The Flood

It had been raining for eleven days when the river finally burst its banks. In the small Somerset town of Ashcombe, people had watched the water rise all week, filling sandbags and carrying their furniture upstairs, but nobody expected what happened on Thursday night. Shortly after ten o'clock, a section of the old flood wall collapsed, and within an hour the high street was under a meter of brown, freezing water.

Helen Price, who presented the morning show on Ashcombe FM, the town's tiny community radio station, was at home when the power went off. The station's studio was in a room above the library, which, she guessed correctly, was now flooded. For a few minutes she sat in the dark, listening to the rain hammering on the roof and the sirens in the distance. Then she remembered the emergency kit that the station manager had insisted on keeping in her garage: a small battery-powered transmitter, a microphone and an old laptop. Helen's house was on the hill above the town. The water would not reach it.

At 11:42 p.m., listeners with battery radios heard a familiar voice. "Good evening, Ashcombe. This is Helen, and I'm broadcasting from my kitchen table, so please excuse the sound of the kettle. The mobile signal is patchy and the main roads are closed, so let's help each other. If you need help, or if you can offer it, send a text to this number and I'll read it out."

Over the next thirty-six hours, Helen hardly left her chair. Messages poured in, and she read them all out: an elderly man on Mill Lane was trapped upstairs and needed his heart medication; a farmer with a tractor could take people to the school, which had been turned into an emergency shelter; the bakery on Church Street had lost its electricity but still had two hundred loaves that needed eating. Helen passed on official warnings from the emergency services, the latest weather forecast and the times of high tide, which would push even more water up the river. Whenever she could, she also played music, because, as she told her listeners, "everyone needs a bit of normal".

Some of her information saved lives. When a family texted to say that the water was coming up their stairs and their phone battery was almost dead, Helen read out their address, and a neighbor with a canoe paddled through the flood and reached them within twenty minutes. When the authorities announced that a second storm was on its way, she repeated the warning every quarter of an hour until everyone living near the river had left their homes.

Not everything went smoothly. At three in the morning, her laptop overheated and the broadcast went silent for ten minutes, which felt like hours. Her teenage son, Sam, woke up, found her close to tears, and spent the rest of the night acting as her producer, sorting the messages into "urgent" and "can wait" and making endless cups of tea. At one point, a national news channel rang and asked to interview her live. She politely refused. "I'm a bit busy," she said, "and my listeners need me more than you do."

By Saturday afternoon, the rain had stopped and the water had started to go down. It left behind a terrible mess: ruined carpets, flooded cars, sofas and fridges piled up on the pavements, and a thick layer of mud over everything. More than three hundred homes had been damaged. But nobody in Ashcombe had died, and the emergency services later described the community's response as one of the best they had ever seen.

Helen finally went to bed on Saturday evening and slept for fourteen hours. When she woke up, there was a cake on her doorstep, and then another, and another. Over the following weeks, dozens of people stopped her in the street to thank her. The station's studio took four months to repair, and in the meantime Ashcombe FM carried on broadcasting from Helen's kitchen.

When the new studio finally opened, the station manager presented her with a gift: a shiny new kettle, mounted on a wooden board, with a small brass plate underneath. It reads: "The most important voice in Ashcombe."