The home of an 83-year-old woman who drowned during Storm Babet did not have formal flood defences, an inquest has heard.
Maureen Gilbert was found “floating in the water” in her home in Tapton Terrace in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, by her son on the morning of 21 October 2023.
Gilbert was one of seven people who died as a result of Storm Babet, which caused thousands of homes to be without power across the UK.
The inquest at Chesterfield coroner’s court heard that Gilbert died when the River Rother overflowed its banks. About 400 homes in the Chesterfield area were evacuated during the storm.
Neil Longden, the Environment Agency operations manager for Yorkshire, told the inquest on Monday that Tapton Terrace where Gilbert resided was at a high risk of flooding due to several factors, including lying on low land and being at the point where multiple water sources come together.
Despite this, the street was found to have no flood defences. When asked why, Longden said the “answer really is you can build something, but someone has to pay for it”.
He added: “There is a feasible solution to the problem but funding, and potentially the planning process, may put that at risk.”
Longden also told the court there are “thousands of people at flood risk” throughout Britain, and that you would “have that challenge in many locations around the country”.
The court heard that a storage reservoir, a unit that can hold large amounts of water in case of flooding, was installed downstream of River Rother in 2018 to reduce the peak flow caused by heavy rainfall.
Longden described Storm Babet as “one of the most significant storms” he had encountered and a “different type of storm than I have experienced before” because of the amount of rain. He told the court the storage reservoir was the “only significant step” taken to protect the area from flooding between 2007, when Chesterfield experienced intense flooding, and Storm Babet.
Gilbert’s son, Paul Gilbert, attended the first day of the inquest.
He told Sky News in 2023 that he had tried to secure his mother’s home with makeshift flood defences, which he had done for every flood warning since 2007, as residents feared an inundation, saying that “everybody on the street did as much as they could”.
He told an interviewer at the time: “She lived on the street all her life. Rebuilding after the 2007 flood was hard for us and her but this is just devastating. We now only have memories as everything else is gone.”
In the aftermath of Storm Babet Derbyshire police, whose officers responded to the flooding, referred themselves to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which decided that the matter should be dealt with locally by the force.
The inquest will continue on Tuesday and is expected to last five days.
