THE clean-up is still going on more than a week after the flash floods havoc brought by the downpour of two and quarter inches of rain on East Lancashire in under an hour.
But horrendous as the Friday evening deluge was, it does not compare with unforgettable floods of 1964 -- when a fantastic 3.1 inches fell.
As these pictures show, the flooding that Saturday, July 18, spelled disaster across the region.
In Haslingden, a 79-year-old woman was drowned inside her son's house when a raging torrent roared in at the back door.
At Rising Bridge, a shop and the house next door collapsed -- brought down when the force of floodwater caved in a culvert underneath them. Meanwhile, aggravated by the culvert's inability to cope, the floodwater rushing down nearby Northfield Road, and built up behind the Manchester Road embankment to such an extent that it reached the ground-floor ceilings of these houses there (pictured, left).
The storm also destroyed a bungalow at Hoddlesden, near Darwen, when half of it plunged into a pit that formed as the foundations were swept away.
In towns throughout East Lancashire, whole streets had to be evacuated. This was done in operations like the one in Princess Street, in Blackburn's Waterfall area, where residents were taken by lorry to dry ground.
And with the annual holiday fortnight of tens of East Lancashire towns having begun that day, many householders had gone away and were unaware of the devastation effecting their homes.
Even so, there were still enough desperate stay-at-homes to swamp the emergency services with calls for help -- more than 1,000 of which were made across East Lancashire.
In Accrington alone 300 homes were underwater and in Burnley and Padiham almost £3 million-worth of damage was caused -- an amount equal to £33 million today.
Scenes like that in Blackburn Road, Darwen, where a petrol station was flooded and the main road turned into a river, and Bury Road, Rawtenstall (pictured, right), when a busman waded across in his bare feet when it became a river, were matched across East Lancashire.
East Lancashire's most disastrous storm was the three-hour night-time downpour of August 23, 1848, which burst the banks of a factory lodge at the site of the present-day pond in Darwen's Bold Venture. Park. It hurled an enormous wall of water downhill into the town centre, almost completely submerging houses in the low-lying Water Street-High Street-Lumb Street area -- demolished in the 1890s -- and drowning 12 people, most of whom were asleep.
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