An elderly widow says she will have to spend months living in a hotel after her house was destroyed by flooding two weeks ago.
Shirley Edwards has lived alone in her terraced house in Midmay Road, Stevenage, since her husband William died in 1997.
The 73-year-old former Herts County Council employee moved into the house shortly after she got married in 1969 and has been flooded four times since.
During the heavily rainfall two weeks ago the entire ground floor of her house flooded, forcing her to move into a Holiday Inn in the town.
She said: “I just feel the council need to do something so that we have drainage that can take the volume of water. We are in a dip so we get rain water from the front and the back.
“The insurance company have told me that this is a major claim because I will have to have nearly everything downstairs replaced and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get insured in the future.
“I’ve contacted the council a few times asking them to come and do something but so far I’ve had no response.”
A spokesman for the council said: “We’re sorry to hear about flooding incidents in Mildmay Road during the exceptionally heavy rainfall on Friday, September 19.
“Highway drainage systems are designed to deal with certain frequencies of rainfall intensity and flooding during this storm was caused by a very large volume of water falling in a short space of time. This overwhelmed the drainage system and caused the localised flooding.”
Ringway, Herts Highways contractor for road works, confirmed they have received a report about the problem and will investigate it in the next few weeks.
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