The Boscastle Flood

Authors Avatar by lizzishaw_ (student)

When?

On the 16th August 2004, in just over 5 hours, Boscastle went from a small tourist attraction to a disaster zone.

Where?

 Boscastle is a small village on the north Cornish coast. The village was built on the confluence of the Valency and Jordan rivers. A third river also runs through the village. All three of these rivers burst their banks on this day. Boscastle is a very popular tourist area and has residential and local services earning income for the local community every day. The village had never been flooded before but events such as the Lynmouth flood occurred further up the Cornish coast.

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Why?

The flood occurred due to a certain set of circumstances including physical and human factors.

Physical factors

The village has steep valley sides resulting in lots of surface run-off and it also lays at the confluence of the river Jordan and river Valency. The summer of 2004 had been an unusually wet summer therefore by August the ground was saturated. On the 16th August rain clouds formed above the north of Cornwall and didn’t move because of covering winds. In the afternoon an unpredicted amount of rainfall, roughly over 1.400 million litres in only 2 hours. Nearly 200,000 litres per ...

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