LAST week saw the River Wear at its highest since work began on the new County Hall being built on The Sands. It still had quite a way to go to flood the road outside the Radisson Hotel though.
In my 77 years of living in Durham City I have seen the Wear four feet deep on the DCRFC Hollow Drift pitch. I have had to plodge to play squash on the university courts on the Racecourse and seen Maiden Castle marooned by the Wear with floors having to be replaced.
Consider what the flooding must have been like in 1771 when the Wear was eight feet higher than it had ever been before, destroying both Elvet and Prebends bridges and a huge landslip up at Low Barnes Nature Reserve near Crook changed the course of the Wear. I am sure these biblical-proportion floods will happen again and I cannot believe that building on a flood plain is a good idea. Time will tell.
Malcolm Rolling, Carrville, Durham.
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