GREAT AND DISASTROUS FLOODS IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume 11, Issue 821, 26 January 1867, Page 3

GREAT AND DISASTROUS FLOODS IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND.

Floods widely destructive of life and property have recently occurred. From the Trent to the Tweed the streams and rivers have all been swollen by the incessant rainfall beyond all remembered precedent, and vast floods have carried devastation and ruin wherever the nature of a district gave motive power to the immense bodies of water. For several weeks past the rainfall, especially on the Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Derbyshire hills, has been extraordinary; but up to Thursday night, November 15, no particular danger was apprehended. In the dark hours, however, the people were roused in all directions by that peculiar sound, sullen and hoarse, which indicates the gathering of the waters, and before dawn there was a vast spread of ruin over two of the broadest English counties. The Irwell, the Irk, and the Medlock had burst their boundaries, and run through Manchester as roaring torrents, carrying along their course the huge bulks of uprooted tree?, cottage staircases, barrels of oil and parafin, mill machinery, the roofs of houses, and an indescribable melee of wreck. The inundation swept over villages, rolled into cellars, and invaded warehouses and human habitations up to the second storey, drowned horses and cattle, swamped the Peel-park, extinguished the furnaces in the factories, stopped trains at full speed, washed the ballast from the lines, submerged immense sweeps of field and pasture so deeply that the hedges disappeared from sight, choked tunnels, and swept away many human beings to their deaths on the banks of the Aire. There were boats navigating the streets of Wakefield, and waggons engaged to rescue the people imprisoned in their dwellings by this fatal deluge ; hundreds of mills are stopped, and thousands of hands, as an inevitable consequence, will be thrown out of employment. In Abraham park, only the tops of the trees can be seen. Ships ride upon the very quays ; bridges have been shattered to their foundations ; chimney stalks have been literally flung bodily from their foundations, and the valley of the Calder for five miles is an unbroken lake. The Manchester Guardian, devoting three columns to recording the above and other facts says : — We regret to have to add that several lives have been lost. One man was drowned in. Lower Broughton, two were drowned at Wakefield, one at Bradford, and one in the neighbourhood of Stalybridge. At Ripponden, near Halifax, a woman and three children perished through the washing away of a bridge which they were crossing. Several narrow escapes are recorded."

In addition to the above melancholy details, an appalling catastrophe is reported to have occurred at Leeds. It appears that a coal barge was overturned at Leeds Bridge, and obstructed the course of the current. On the north bank is a palisade terrace, appertaining to Mr. Conyers, leather merchant, and this was washed by the flood which had to pass through an archway near that gentleman's place of business. On Saturday morning, Nov. 17, at 7 o'clock, some 30 persons-had assembled on this terrace to see the wreck, when all at once the earthwork gave" way, and the 30 persons were precipitated into the foaming stream. Six females who had in despair clustered together, fastening to each other's garments, were rescued by the captains of two vessels by means of boat-hooks, and were recovered. One corpse, that of a man resembling a commercial traveller, was fished out by a brave fellow who saw the last convulsive struggles of the man and brought him to land, but he was then dead. There is no doubt that at least 20 lives have been lost by this sad accident.

The remarkable characteristic of this visitation is the extensive area of the tract over which its ravages have been carried. It has assailed Manchester, Lower Braughton, and Strangeways ; it has swept through Blackburn, Darwen, and Stockport ; it has broken over entire quarters of Preston. It has la^d waste whole districts in and about Wakefield. It has closed the roads to Huddersfield from north and south. At Leeds all the low-lying parts of the town are several feet under water, and at Manchester alone it is computed that nearly a thousand persons have been made temporalily homeless. An appeal to the public benevolence will of course be made on their behalf, and equally of course will be warmly responded to ; for the loss to iUm mtiSfc be Mttei? indeed. They, for" the time, are thrown out of work ; their habitations are destroyed, or more or less damaged; their furniture is irretrievably injured ; their clothes are rendered worthless. We must add to this the general sacrifice of the great manufacturing region which this deluge has invaded. Happily, there were no crops to suffer ; but an enormous amount of property has been swept out of the warehouses ; the railways are impaired; the complex and delicate machinery of hundreds of mills must have sustained serious if not irreparable injury ; the autumnal, sowings have been drowned out of the land ; ships have actually .ridden over the sides of the rivers, into which it is a problem how they can ever be launched again ; quays and wharves have been forced away by the rush of the swollen waters, with all the store of wealth upon them. Numbers of sheep and oxen have perished. In all we shall not be far wrong in computing the cost of this misfortune at half a million sterling. Considering, however, all the circumstances, the loss of property has not been very great.