Midleton after the flood: ‘You’ve no idea of the mental trauma of doing business in this town, let alone living here’
Kieran Goldspring reckoned it took just eight minutes for his terraced house on McDermott Street in the centre of Midleton to flood with water after the river Owenacurra burst its banks at lunch hour. This sent torrents of water down Main Street and elsewhere. The Department of Enterprise, Trade, and Employment set up a compensation scheme to be administered through the Irish Red Cross for those badly damaged businesses that did not have such insurance. Some 266 applicants received a total of €9,273,963.
Like Farmgate, Denbar Jewellers was also badly hit by the flood. A metre of water sweeping into the shop forced owner Barbara Hurley to undertake a big revamp as her solid beech units were destroyed. Hurley, like others in the town, welcomes the interim flood relief works being carried out by Cork County Council, including the removal of debris and the collapsed remains of Moore’s Bridge from the Owenacurra. Yet she wonders why it wasn’t started last spring and completed before winter sets in.
Among them was Caroline Leahy, whose house in the Tír Cluain estate, north of the town, was flooded to a depth of a metre. Her focus, like that of fellow flood protection group member Goldspring, is on obtaining flood gates or removable Individual Property Protection for her house. Goldspring makes a similar point regarding McDermott Street. If he puts up an IPP to stop water entering his end-of-terrace house but those farther along the street can’t afford to get the flood barriers, the effect will be to displace water from his property towards them.