Why the rain did not fix it, and why it flooded instead

Author: Slightly Anxious Date: 24th August 2026 Time to read: 11 minutes

Slightly Anxious is here to help you turn any crisis into a manageable adventure — for you and everyone you care about.

You have spent most of this summer being told not to use a hosepipe. Then, one evening in the middle of August, it rained hard enough that the water came off the road in a sheet, the drain at the end of your street gave up entirely, and there was a small brown lake outside number forty two by the time the kettle had boiled. Within the same twenty four hours the Environment Agency was issuing flood warnings, and nine water companies were still banning hosepipes. If you concluded from all of this that somebody somewhere has stopped paying attention, we would completely forgive you.

Both things are true at once, and they are true for the same reason. The ground is the reason. Once you understand what months of dry weather do to the soil in your garden and under your road, the hosepipe ban and the flood warning stop looking like a contradiction. They start looking like two symptoms of one condition, which is a much less unsettling thing to live with, and considerably more useful when it comes to deciding what to do about it.

What actually happened this month

At the time of writing, the Environment Agency reports that 71 per cent of England by land is in drought. Reservoir storage across England stood at 62.6 per cent on the 18th of August, a figure that had fallen by 3.4 percentage points in a single week and sat 16.3 per cent below the average for the time of year. Seven major reservoirs are classed as having exceptionally low storage. Rainfall across England for August up to that point was 17 per cent of the long term average, and in the south east it was 5 per cent, which is another way of saying almost none at all.

Nine water companies now have a temporary use ban, which is the official name for a hosepipe ban, covering all or part of their areas, and roughly 29 million people are living under some restriction on how they use water. Wessex Water brought in a company wide ban on the 18th of August, and Affinity Water extended its ban across its eastern region in the same few days. The National Drought Group, which is the body that coordinates all of this, has started meeting weekly rather than monthly. That tells you rather more about the seriousness of the situation than any single percentage does.

And then it rained. The first meaningful rain in months arrived as thunderstorms from Wednesday the 19th of August. Within a day the Environment Agency had flood warnings in force, including one for high river levels expected to cause flooding at Nelson in Lancashire, with flood alerts also out for Crossens in west Lancashire, Middlesbrough Becks, and the River Alt between Formby and Huyton. The Met Office warned of slow moving showers dropping between 20 and 30 millimetres of rain in an hour or two, with a risk of flash flooding, hail, and short power cuts caused by lightning. Wisley in Surrey had gone 62 days without rain, the longest dry streak in the country. It broke with 1.6 millimetres.

So: a hosepipe ban and a flood warning, in the same country, in the same week, and in a few places on very nearly the same street.

Why hard ground floods

Here is the part that almost nobody explains properly, and it is worth reading twice, because it is the opposite of what common sense suggests. You would reasonably assume that very dry ground is thirsty ground, and that a downpour onto a parched garden simply vanishes into it. In fact the reverse happens. When soil dries out over a long period it shrinks, hardens and compacts, and clay soils, which a great deal of England is built on, go further than that and crack. The surface effectively bakes. Water arriving on baked soil behaves rather more like water arriving on a patio than water arriving on a sponge. Instead of soaking in, it runs off across the top, downhill, gathering speed and picking up everything loose on the way.

This is not our theory. The Environment Agency puts it in almost exactly those words in its own weekly drought report. It warns farmers that with ground conditions so dry, water does not easily soak into baked and compacted soils, and that this increases the risk of run off. The Agency is saying it to farmers because of what run off does to rivers, but the same physics is at work in your garden, on the playing field behind the houses, and across every square metre of hard baked ground between the top of your street and the drain at the bottom of it.

Add to that the second half of the problem, which is the sheer speed of the rain. A summer thunderstorm does not deliver its water politely over eight hours the way a grey November afternoon does. It dumps it. Twenty to thirty millimetres in an hour or two is roughly a month of rain arriving in the time it takes to watch a film. Drainage systems are sized for ordinary British drizzle, and they simply cannot take water in at that rate, no matter how thirsty the ground underneath them might be. Obviously the drain is also full of everything that has blown into it since May, which does not help!

Put the two together and you get a summer flash flood: water that cannot soak in, arriving faster than anything can carry it away, on ground that is drier than it has been in decades. The drought did not prevent that flood. The drought is a large part of why it happened.

And why the drought carries on regardless

The other half of the puzzle is why all that dramatic water did nothing for the reservoirs, and the answer follows directly from the first half. Water that runs off the surface and straight into a river is water that is not soaking down into the groundwater, and groundwater is what keeps rivers flowing and boreholes working through a dry autumn. A thunderstorm can therefore be too much water and not enough water at the same time. That sounds like a riddle, but it is simply what happens when the right amount of rain arrives in the wrong shape.

The numbers bear it out. Even after the rain, the Environment Agency recorded reservoir storage still falling, still 16.3 per cent below average, and rainfall for the month still at 17 per cent of normal. A quarter of the river monitoring sites it reports on remain classed as exceptionally low for the time of year. Ending a drought of this size does not need a spectacular week, it needs a boring few months, and the difference between those two things is not something anybody can hurry along.

The practical consequence for you and your loved ones is straightforward. The hosepipe ban is not about to be lifted because it rained impressively for two days, and anyone assuming otherwise is going to be disappointed, and possibly fined. Restrictions have followed the reservoir all summer, not the weather forecast, and there is no reason to expect that to change.

What this means for your house, specifically

None of the above is much use as a dinner party fact unless it changes something you do, so here is what it changes. There are three things that a drought followed by a downpour does to an ordinary British home, and all three of them are cheap to deal with in advance and expensive to deal with afterwards.

The first is drainage, and specifically the drains and gullies that nobody has looked at since about March. A gully half full of dried leaves, seed heads, grit and general summer debris will cope perfectly well with normal rain. It will fail completely in a thunderstorm, at exactly the moment when the water has nowhere else to go, and clearing the gully outside your house and the gutter above it is a twenty minute job with a pair of gloves. It is thoroughly unpleasant and you will find things in there you would rather not have met, but it is the highest value twenty minutes available to you this month.

The second is the direction water travels across your own property. Go outside during the next heavy shower and simply watch where it goes. That is far more informative than looking at a dry garden and imagining. You are looking for whether water runs towards the house or away from it, whether the patio sheds into the flowerbed or into the back door, and whether there is a low point beside a wall where a puddle forms and sits. On baked ground this will be much more obvious than usual, because almost nothing is soaking in, so you will get an unusually honest picture of how your plot actually behaves. Write down what you see. Five minutes standing in the rain in your slippers tells you more about your flood risk than any map will!

The third is that heavy summer storms take the power out. The Met Office specifically warned of short power cuts from lightning strikes during this spell. A thunderstorm sitting over a local substation is one of the most common causes of the brief, annoying, two hour outage that catches households with no torch and a phone on 4 per cent. It is not a crisis situation, but it is a great deal more comfortable when there is a charged torch in the kitchen drawer and a power bank that somebody remembered to top up.

There is one exception, and it matters. If water is genuinely rising towards your property, do not spend your time clearing gutters or watching where puddles form. Get the important things upstairs, and get yourself and your loved ones out. We cover that properly in ‘Slightly Anxious about rising water levels’, and the honest summary is that almost everybody who comes to harm in a flood does so because they underestimated how fast it moved.

Your to do list is:

• Clear the gully outside your house and the gutters above it, and do it before the next storm rather than during it.

• Stand outside in the next heavy shower and watch which way the water runs across your garden and your drive. Write down where it collects.

• Check that airbricks, cellar lights and any low vents at the front of the house are not sitting in the path you just identified.

• Move anything you would hate to lose off the floor of the garage, cellar or under-stairs cupboard. It costs nothing and takes ten minutes.

• Put a working torch somewhere you can find it in the dark, and charge the power bank you have almost certainly forgotten about.

• Check whether you are in a flood warning area at check-for-flooding.service.gov.uk, and sign up for warnings while you are there, because they are free.

• Keep filling water containers from the tap, hosepipe ban or no hosepipe ban. Storing water in a jug is not using a hosepipe, and the ban does not apply to it.

• If you have a water butt, this is the week it earns its keep, because the run off you have been reading about is running off your roof too.

What we would actually buy

We are going to be honest about the order of these. The temptation with flooding is to sell people the dramatic kit and skip the boring kit, and the boring kit is what most households actually need.

FloodSax Sandless Sandbag Absorbent Flood Barrier (20-pack) at c.£150-£180 – these are flat, dry, and about the size of a large envelope, until you put them in water and they swell into something that behaves like a sandbag. We prefer them to actual sandbags for the simple reason that you can store twenty of them in a cupboard rather than keeping a heap of wet sand by the shed for three years. Not cheap, but they are the thing you want already in the house, not the thing you go looking for at nine on a Sunday evening.

Floodshield Reusable Inflatable Flood Barrier 1.5m Marine PVC at c.£120-£150 – an inflatable tube that seals across a doorway, made of proper marine grade PVC rather than the paddling pool material some of the cheaper ones use. Reusable, which matters, and it packs down small.

Generic Aluminium Flood Barrier 80cm x 60cm at c.£130-£170 – a rigid metal barrier for a standard doorway. Less fiddly than the inflatable options and, frankly, more reassuring to look at. You do need somewhere sensible to keep a large sheet of aluminium, mind, and behind the wardrobe is not it!

Dam Easy Flood Protection Barrier for Doors 780mm-1100mm at c.£750-£1,000 – this is the serious end of the market, adjustable across a range of door widths and designed to go up in a couple of minutes by one person. It is a lot of money, and we would only recommend it if you are in a known flood risk area and have been flooded before, in which case you already know exactly why it is worth it.

Dewel Adjustable Appliance Base 28-31cm at c.£40-£50 – a stand that lifts a washing machine or tumble dryer about a foot off the floor. Deeply unglamorous, and probably the best value item in this entire list. A washing machine thirty centimetres up is a washing machine that survives the shallow flooding most British homes actually get.

On the water side, and this is the half that the ban makes relevant rather than the storm:

25 Litre Jerry Can Water Container at c.£10-£20 – the cheapest sensible way to keep a useful quantity of water in the house. One of these per person is not a bad starting point, and at this price there is very little excuse.

Folding Water Container 10L (2-pack) at c.£10-£15 – these collapse flat when empty, which is the entire point, and they live in a drawer until the day the taps go quiet. Ours have been folded in a cupboard for years being no trouble to anybody!

Thick Plastic Emergency Water Barrel with Spigot 50L at c.£40-£60 – a proper storage barrel with a tap at the bottom, which sounds like a small detail until you have tried to pour from a full fifty litre container. Good for a garage or a utility room.

Storm Trading Group 250L Water Butt XL with Stand & Tap at c.£80-£100 – a garden water butt, and after the month we have all just had, quite a lot of people are going to be buying one. Roof water is not drinking water, but for the garden, the car and flushing a lavatory it is perfectly good, and every litre of it is a litre you are not taking from a reservoir sitting 16 per cent below where it should be.

Oasis 67mg Water Purification Tablets (200) at c.£5-£10 – for treating water of uncertain quality. They taste unmistakably of swimming pool and we will not pretend otherwise! Two hundred tablets at this price is still one of the better bits of value in emergency preparedness. Always read the label and consult a pharmacist if unsure.

Blukar LED Torch Rechargeable Ultra High Lumens at c.£20-£30 – an unfussy rechargeable torch, bright enough to be properly useful and cheap enough to buy three of. Three is what we would suggest, because a torch in a drawer downstairs is no use at all to somebody standing at the top of the stairs in the dark.

Anker Prime Power Bank 20,000mAh at c.£110-£130 – enough to charge a couple of phones several times over. The trick with power banks is not buying one, it is remembering to charge it, so put a reminder in your phone for the first of the month and let the phone nag you about it.

Where to read more

If the water goes off rather than arrives, our article ‘What to do when the water has been turned off with Slightly Anxious’ covers how much you actually need to store and why we say ten litres per person per day rather than the two or three litres you will see elsewhere, and ‘Hygiene is everything with Slightly Anxious’ is the one people always wish they had read first when the taps stop. For flooding itself, ‘Slightly Anxious about rising water levels’ is the article to read. If the storm takes the power with it, ‘What to do when the power goes out’ and ‘What to do when the lights go out’ will see you through the evening.

And if, having cleared the gutter and stood about in the rain in your slippers, you feel you have earned something rather stronger than tap water, ‘What to drink in an emergency situation’ is our thoroughly unscientific tour of what the great novelists reached for when things went badly wrong. It is not a safety guide, it makes no pretence of being one, and it does end with the sober bit about what alcohol actually does to your judgement in a crisis, because somebody had to say it.

There is something slightly maddening about a summer that manages to be both too dry and too wet. We understand entirely why people have spent the last fortnight looking at a flooded road and a hosepipe ban and concluding that the whole system has lost the plot. It has not. It is behaving exactly as hard, cracked, sun baked ground and a fast moving thunderstorm would lead you to expect, and that it feels contradictory says more about how rarely anybody explains the ground to us than it does about the weather.

What we would take from this month is not that something alarming is happening. It is that the two halves of household water preparedness, keeping some in and keeping some out, have turned out to be the same job, done in the same week, in the same house. Quite convenient, really. Clear the gully, stand in the rain for five minutes and watch where it goes, fill a couple of containers from the tap, and put a torch somewhere sensible. None of it is expensive, none of it requires you to think of yourself as a Prepper, and all of it will still be useful in November, when the rain finally arrives properly and everybody has forgotten there was ever a drought at all.

Remember, keep calm and visit us here.

This blog post has been AI-assisted with human oversight