Soz if this as been mentioned before:

BBC News : M1 in West Yorkshire closed in flash flooding

Living in Leeds I can't say I noticed it raining that heavily but then I am the other side, anyone else any experience?

This was on the M1-A1 link, I can't help wondering if it's a design flaw with the drainage??

It's not really worth a whole thread but this seems like a suitable place to add it...

This morning I woke up to news that the A27 was flooded near Chichester. This isn't news, it happens every time it rains, and there are usually delays.

This time it turned out that the flood was actually between Chichester and Emsworth. Then reports went around that the road was completely impassable and people were being sent along the old road (now A259 instead).

Then I heard that the A259 had flooded and was impassable too!

The short of it is that this is what the A27 has looked like all day, and there have been huge delays.

EDIT: Current forecast is that the road will be blocked for 24 hours.

There were isolated very heavy showers in South/West Yorkshire last night, I heard tales this morning of the road disappearing in front of drivers, people stopping until the rain slowed, gutters being ripped off... We had nothing last night, yet just a few miles away at Meadowhall, there were massive puddles of water in the road.

There's been extensive flooding here in London as well, where the last 24 hours had one of the heaviest sustained downpours I can recall for many years. This was described today as causing issues as it fell on ground "already well saturated from recent heavy rains".

Despite this, we have a hosepipe ban, which Thames Water still tries to justify, not that anyone would be thinking of getting hosepipes out at the moment to water gardens !. Of course the real justification for them is it helps to suppress demand and thus their own costs, while they continue to bill an ever-increasing London area userbase and be allowed annual increases more than inflation. At privatisation they bought, cheaply, a legacy of some hundreds of reservoirs and boreholes, all prior investments using past water services revenues, yet nowadays their PR team make a real hoopla of even just one proposed new reservoir.

Well I know who claimed to have designed this section when they were seconded to Pell's and it doesn't surprise me in the least; to be fair it was built across some of the nastiest crud whose long term stability is a bit questionable. Added to this the DBFO co had a tendency to build an 'approximation' of their actual design (which had been value managed to death anyway from the indicative design).

Multiple road closures in West Sussex today due to flooding. Currently looks like it is near-on-impossible to get in or out of Bognor with both the A29 and A259 (both east and west) closed. A283 is closed from the A24 through to Steyning; I drove it earlier this afternoon and was just about passable. Parts of the A24 north of Worthing weren't pleasant either but surprisingly seems to have avoided closure. Never seen so much rain in these parts.

I drove back south down the M1 from Leeds yesterday night and saw the northbound traffic was stopped by a police roadblock. I wondered what was going on, as the southbound carriageway wasn't affected

The A6102 was closed at Oughtibridge with a police diversion, and the A6101 Rivelin Valley Road was also blocked west of Malin Bridge.

The M3 was apparently flooded near J5 this afternoon as well.

Another pic of the A27 underwater here

I understand the B2178 is also flooded.
That'd mean you're stuck with the lanes for Chichester-Portsmouth movements...

Don't worry, in a few days, once the water's gone down to tiny puddles at the side of the road, we'll get Flood signs up.

I hope it stops raining soon down there - I'm not looking forward to wandering around Lord March's front garden in a couple of weekends' time with that much water around!

I'm sorry I can't remember the technical details but the general gist of the report on the late Look North (BBC) last night was that the drainage had been built to specifications that had been declared obsolete before the road's construction had even been commissioned. But then they interviewed someone in the know who said the drainage was up to scratch and could deal with normal heavy rain, but not the truly exceptional downpours experienced there on the night in question. To be fair it did, as others have suggested, appear to be extremely localised.

It was indeed localised...

Driving along the Stocksbridge bypass Sunday night was awful, standing water and very heavy rain, yet the rain had totally stopped by the time I got to the M1, and dry roads by the M18 turn.

The A27 opened at 6am this morning.

Meanwhile, there were reports of delays of two hours on the M3 this morning, due to flooding near Fleet.

EDIT: Video filmed in West Sussex here.

All this flooding and I'm working away and can't go out and play in my Land Rover!


Thames Water do make me laugh, while the Central Line was closed last week because Thames Water dumped 2 million litres down the tunnel by Stratford, there was a large advert just outside Stratford station about saving water!

My plumber and his lad arrived on Monday morning. He lives in Hillsborough and roads were underwater. The lad lives in Halfway and there was no rain at all.

Apparently Thames Water are about to lift the hosepipe ban.

Of course, after all this rain the last thing I need to do now is get the hosepipe out.

It does make me laugh when people say about heavy rain and then about the hosepipe bans. Its almost like wondering why someone driving to your house from Edinburgh to London hasn't arrived yet when they only set off 10 minutes ago.

And of course mains bursts will always happen, despite the age of the infrastructure so again - apart from the irony of it - is still a bit of a non-story really.

We like irony! For example, the car that hit the please drive carefully sign. Had it hit any other sign, it wouldn't be funny.

The M1 had one of those big signs read:

"Dont Drink and Drive"

Fair enough they have them up all the time.

However it also had "End" lit up, so i guess after that sign i could drink and drive?