Storm Bert fills the Taff to overflowing

Rain in the night and lighter rain most of the morning flood warnings galore. Miserable. We went to Saint Catherine's for the Eucharist. With the Sunday school children, wearing paper crowns in honour of Christ the King at the end, we were over forty. Despite the weather yesterday's Christmas Fayre exceeded last year's revenue by more than ten percent. Hilary remarked on the number of older non churchgoing people from the neighbourhood, among those making the effort to attend the Fayre. It's a positive indication about the good will the church enjoys locally. 

After lunch, I took a brolly and my camera for a walk in the rain down to Blackweir. As expected after two days of continuous rain, often heavy was exceptionally high, high enough to break through the banks on both sides, flooding the fields. It was worse this time than when the fields last flooded, with water this time reaching up as far as the initial west side flood protection dyke where the ground level rises sharply by about a metre. The last time this happened on 17th Feb 2020, during storm 'Dennis'. I'm not sure without checking the photos I took then if it was as bad then. I need to check my photo archive. Then I walked up to the Western Avenue road bridge and there the water was spilling over on both sides of the river, and the Taff Trail was awash. 

Up until now remedial work on a few places on the banks and riverbed undertaken after the last big inundation have contained heavy flow pretty well. The volume of water and the speed at which it's being dumped by storm 'Bert' suggest a higher scale of magnitude, such as was seen recently in Valencia, on a much bigger scale given the size of the mountains and area of the watershed. I wonder what more can be done in the flood plain occupied by the city, to improve flood protection further? 

I got home just after sunset, a mile short of my daily target. I didn't want to get any wetter than I already was. In the evening we watched Antiques Road show, and then BBC's Young Jazz Musician of the Year. A brilliant and inspiring display of musicianship from competitors aged between 18 and 22. This year a new performance item was added to the programme, in which all four finalists performed a Charlie Parker tune which they'd learned to play together from scratch in the previous 48 hours. Such a joy!

Flood alert weekend

Yesterday, it had rained heavily at night and continued for part of the day as well. Dangerous weather warnings were issued by the Met Office. It was just as well I had a Sunday sermon to finish. During a break in the weather, I walked to Blackweir Bridge and took photos of the Taff, turned into a raging torrent with the water level on the west side so high it was lapping at the edge of the footpath. I'd never seen it so high before. 

On BBC Four in the evening a second series of crime drama 'Hidden', set in North Wales occupied the prime time crime at nine slot. The cops are the same as last time, but the baddies are a group of three disturbed teenagers up to sinister no good things. Very promising.

This morning, I was back in St Samson's again at nine, preaching on the 'Creation Sunday' theme in the Revised Common Lectionary. I was caught out, however. The parish uses the Roman Lectionary scheme of Sundays in 'Ordinary Time' with a totally different set of readings. I had to hunt through a couple of Lectionary books with scriptural indices to find the readings I was expecting and ask for these to be read instead. My request was  received graciously, and we started on time.

After the service I returned home, and then walked down to Pontcanna Fields to take a look at the state of the river after a second night of heavy rain. I heard on the news that the Taff had burst its banks and caused flooding up at Pontypridd, Nantgarw and Llandaff North, so I was interested to see what impact this exceptional volume of water passing underneath Blackweir Bridge would have.

Not only was the field between the footpath and the dyke flooded, but also half of the field a couple of feet above it. This was due to water breaking through a higher up on the west bank and pouring into the edge of the north side field where the dyke is not so pronounced and the ground slightly more level, so the north side flooded at the higher level and poured over the footpath into the south side. It was quite spectacular to see. The re-engineering of the river bank to improve flood defences was undertaken after Cardiff was flooded back in 1979. Apparently, today the Taff rose 80cm higher than it did on that occasion, so the work done was really put to the test, perhaps like never before.

There was a steady flow of people coming to see and take photos like me. The sensible ones had green wellies on, a few cycled through, and some like me risked the shallows and either turned back or got their feet wet. That's what happened to me. But I got some interesting photos, both yesterday and today. You can see them here.

Martin and Chris invited me over to lunch. One of their guests was a doctor friend from Martin's days as Vicar of Pontyclun, whose brother is one of the GPs in our surgery. The other was the recently retired Bishop of Monmouth Richard Pain, whom I have known for thirty years, through our shared association with Ty Mawr Convent. Neither of us can remember when we last met. I wasn't around when he was consecrated Bishop. It was a lovely afternoon of conversation, eating and drinking fine wines, just catching up and reflecting on ministerial life and the present parlous state of the Church in Wales. It was a respite from solitude which I much appreciated.

Monsoon Christmas

Boxing Day slipped lazily by, the weather was good enough for an afternoon family walk at low tide on the beach and then on the pier in Penarth. Then it was Sunday again, with a Eucharist to celebrate at St Germans for thirty people. We kept the Feast of the Holy Family, but much of what I wanted to preach about was the neglected saints days of the week, St Stephen, St John, Holy Innocents, St Thomas a Becket and St Sylvester - all martyrs except John. Cardinal Vincent Nigholls highlighted this in his Christmas Even interview on the radio, and it got me thinking along his lines about martyrdom today.

We took an afternoon family stroll in the riverside park after lunch. Gail and Anwen came to join us there so that Rhiannon and Anwen could spent time together. We followed a very muddy winding path through the woods along the Canal Feeder as far as the Blackweir Ambulance station, a less than comfortable adventure for the adults. At Blackweir Bridge the Taff was discharging huge volumes of water over the weir at high speed. Above the bridge, water was still a metre from the top of the river bank, thankfully. I wondered what it would be like if it had rained so long and hard here as it has done this month in the north of England.

In Victorian times, the river through the flood prone town centre was straightened out. The building of the Bay Barrage greatly improved flood defences. The last great inundation was in the 1979s, when St John's Vicarage was in Cathedral Road, and a boat called to take the Vicar to church. The barrage destroyed the river's tidal character, but ultimately didn't stop salmon and trout returning, or otters and cormorants. Sections of the river bank were raised, and there's now a secondary dyke through the fields beyond the west bank. We're fortunate there's a gradient in the riverbed right along the river as far inland as Llandaff North, where there's another weir. The drop over three miles from there to the sea is two metres or so, and the clear straight-ish channel makes for fast run-off.

Eastern Cardiff is still a worry, as the river Rhymney runs out through tidal marshes to the estuary, and high volumes of water can still back up at high tide and spill over into inhabited areas. The water table is only a metre below ground in the flat lands along Newport Road, and times of high rainfall are still a worry. Much more investment is still needed for flood defences on the east side of Cardiff Bay. But, until there's a crisis this investment in the future doesn't seem to figure much in public debate.

Before lunch today we walked into town to look around the shops for post Christmas bargains. I came home with a HP mini desktop PC at £230 once I'd bought an adaptor to attach to my new monitor. It's Windows 8.1, so there'll be the usual upgrade hassles. My 2009 mini-tower has become unreliable in switching on recently. It's the last thing I need when I want to work at something quickly. Trouble is, having to install Linux as well with the the EUFI boot security hardware is not going to be at all easy.