In February, storm Dennis brought devastation to the Rhondda. Then covid hit, and the county suffered one of the highest death rates in the whole of Wales. Coming on the back of decades of economic decline, and years of austerity, both crisis have pushed the valleys community to the edge. SC Cook visited victims of the floods, and spoke to local activists and politicians, to assess the damage and see what the future might hold.
Words and Images by SC Cook.
In the early hours of Monday 17th February, Dean Webb was woken up by his phone going off three times.
“I thought it was some drunkard ringing me at 3 in the morning,” he says, trying to find the funny side. “I answered the phone, my sister says “don’t open the front door, look out of your window.”
What faced him as he looked out of the window was the sight of water rushing up his front step and up the door.
“I took two boxes upstairs…” he says, recalling those initial frantic moments. “By the time I came down for the third box, it was like a wave coming in.”
Within minutes the whole downstairs of the house was flooded to waist height, not just with water, but raw sewage. At that point there was nothing he could do, everything bar two boxes of things he’d bought a few days prior was submerged. All he could do was wait upstairs and contemplate how these few moments would change his life for months and years to come.
But his mind was racing. In the back garden were his 3 goats. “I’m a single man,” he says, “and I always call them my babies.”
As soon as the water had subsided he put on a pair of wellies and saw the fire brigade were out on the street. When they heard he had animals, one of the firemen helped Dean through his garden and to the shed where the goats were kept. Upon instruction, Dean opened the door.
“I could see they were okay. I said thank you mate, you saved my babies.” A neighbour who watched the drama unfold from an upstairs window later told Dean that she wished she had a camera to capture the joy and relief on his face. “she could hear me say thank you, thank you.”
It’s at this point that Dean, who’s been holding it together so far, breaks down into tears. His sister, standing next to him, goes to comfort him.
“If that gentleman came through that door now, I would recognise him straight away,” he says through his tears.
“Once we all get sorted… if I go down the valley and I see him, I’d say you won’t be buying drinks all night.”
“For people to do stuff like that, to come out and help, it was nice.”
This raw mix of emotions, from loss to something bordering on love for complete strangers, seems to symbolise what the floods meant to its victims like Dean.
From left: Lewis st, PentreInside Dean’s house after the floodsThe culvert at the top of PentreThe landslip in nearby Tylorstown
In total, it’s estimated that over 1,000 properties were flooded throughout the Rhondda as Storm Dennis brought a month’s worth of rainfall in just 48 hours. Up the road from Pentre, Treorchy was also badly affected and in Tylorstown, rainwater dislodged what was likely coal waste and caused a landslide.
Recalling those frantic moments across the Rhondda as the severity of the crisis hit home, MS Leanne Wood describes her experience as she rushed to help.
“I mean, in the initial days, people were in shock and fear that it would happen again…they were very disoriented.” she explains when we talk over the phone several weeks later.
“It was just really emotional,” Wood says. “Speaking to people, you could see that they were just completely distraught and devastated. They’d lost everything. And they just couldn’t see how they were going to put it all back together again.”
She describes a raw, instinctive anger among affected communities, both at what had happened but also why they hadn’t been protected from the weather, when it seemed others had been.
There are specific reasons for why individual towns and villages were flooded, each slightly different from the other. Underlying them all, however, is an increasingly volatile weather system brought about by climate breakdown, with the poorest least able to mitigate against the effects of events like Storm Dennis. Many people I speak to, however, are reticent to simply blame global warming.
In Pentre, where Dean lives, heavy rain flew down the hill above, pouring into a culvert and into drains. At the point where this water was supposed to flow into the Rhondda River, the waterway was blocked, forcing the drains to overflow in the streets at the bottom, where a mix of rainwater and raw sewage gushed into every house.
“To be honest, I blame the ones in charge of the forestry,” Dean says angrily, referring to Natural Resources Wales, the Welsh Government sponsored body responsible for forestry and waterways. “Because they felled all the trees and left all the bracken on the floor, all boulders were in there, so it blocked the drains.”
Others I speak to say a similar thing, and although they acknowledge the role of climate breakdown when I ask them about it, they want to keep their focus primarily on why the culvert got blocked. By concentrating on global warming, people worry that it will let the immediate culprits off the hook.
“People had lots of questions, and very few answers…There was a mix of emotions really, but it did feel that things were on the edge,” says Leanne Wood.
As an area, Rhondda Cynon Taf, like many areas in South Wales, has been on the edge for some time. Not from the tangible destruction caused by floods, but the slow devastation brought about by almost four decades of neoliberalism that has seen jobs and income security trickle away.
“Economically, the Rhondda’s been struggling since the pit closure programme of 1984,” says Wood, referring to the mine closures under Thatcher which – following a year long strike which almost won – saw 25,000 workers lose their jobs across South Wales.
The effects, she says, are still being felt today, with high levels of deprivation in many communities.
“And of course, austerity over the last 12 years has made a lot of people’s positions even worse…” Wood tells me. “Services that they previously used to rely on, many of them are no longer in existence, or they’ve been cut back so far, you know, they’re inaccessible to people.”
Going out in those initial days after storm Dennis hit, the effects of years of economic neglect became clear. “I think we assume that there’s a safety net there,” Wood says. “[The floods] brought up in sharp focus to me that after 12 years of austerity, it isn’t there.”
She describes watching with horror as the Covid-19 crisis came down the line – immediately after Storm Dennis – and seeing what was happening in Italy. As the Welsh government followed Westminster and delayed locking down, Wood and others immediately began thinking of the impact the virus would have on a place like the Rhondda.
Down the road from Dean Webb, I meet Anita Smith, who with her daughter and young granddaughter, lives in a small terraced house. In a state of shock, she is checking over her home once more as the rain continues to fall outside.
Anita was alerted by a neighbour in the early hours of Monday morning that her house was being flooded. As her granddaughter – only 5 years old – stayed upstairs being comforted by her daughter, Anita tried to brush the water out herself.
Others rushed to help and they worked hard until only the sewerage was left. “As you can see, it’s not even dry yet,” she says, pointing to the stained walls.
Everything downstairs in her home was destroyed, including all of the little girl’s toys, but Anita – who lives in a council house and struggles to support her daughter financially – had no contents insurance. She walks around her house as we talk, unable to fully comprehend the events of the past week.
She describes the area as “lovely, like one big family…[but] it’s not rich.”
“We’re all in the same boat. We’re all struggling. Some of them [who were flooded] are one parent with three or four children,” Anita says.
“There’s no jobs,” she tells me when I ask about the future. “They shut all the factories, and there’s nothing up here anymore.”
This is the world the pandemic hit the hardest. In a recent report looking at towns across Wales and England that were most vulnerable to the social and economic fallout from Covid-19, 8 were in South Wales and 2 – Porth and Tonypandy – were in the Rhondda.
“It’s all connected to the poverty question,” says Leanne Wood. “I mean, there are greater levels of ill health in areas where there’s higher levels of deprivation. So we already know that that has an impact.”
According to the ONS, the virus has claimed the lives of 532 people in Rhondda Cynon Taf, although the true number could be much higher. For the entire nation of Australia, the death toll stands at 102.
The infection rate across the county was the highest in Wales for several weeks, with the latest figures showing 707 Cases per 100,000 residents.
Wood has met with health officials to try and understand why the R rate in the Rhondda has been so high. “I think people are very close knit and their communities and families and that may have a negative impact in this,” she says, adding that they don’t really know what’s underneath it.
One idea that’s come up is that some people have believed conspiracy theories that Covid-19 is not really a risk, meaning lockdown measures were ignored. “I’m not entirely sure about that,” Wood says with scepticism, “I think it’s more to do with people living in very tight knit communities..in terraced housing and because we’ve got those high levels of underlying health conditions.”
The situation can seem overwhelming, but there is something that gives Leanne Wood and many others immense hope in this moment: the community in the Rhondda and across South Wales have displayed an enormous capacity for solidarity and self organisation to help each other.
Even before Storm Dennis made its full impact, the community in the Rhondda swung into action, organising deliveries of essential supplies, food and clothing. People flung themselves into the clean-up operation, community halls were quickly turned into relief centres, organised and run by local people.
It’s one of the first things Dean mentions to me when I meet him. “The community in the valleys,” he says proudly “…I had a gentleman doing the humidifiers. He was shocked how many people get together in the valleys, he said, ‘you don’t get that in England.’”
Dean tells me how he’s had pizzas and fish and chips from local businesses who’ve been down on a daily basis in the past 6 days. Retired firemen, plasterers, shop workers have been around, knocking on doors and asking if they can help. These are just some of the examples I hear about from people in Pentre. On top of this, frontline workers – who for years have faced pay cuts and job losses – threw themselves into the relief effort.
“[I’ll] be honest with you,” says Dean. “The council boys, they deserve triple pay this week because they done [a] hell of a job.”
As the immediate impact of the storm subsided, and Covid hit, another community relief effort was orchestrated to support vulnerable people.
“We set up a volunteer network of 500 people,” Leanne Wood explains, “who are all responsible for looking out for those people on their street, who might be in a vulnerable position, or who might have to self isolate and not be able to leave the house and get their shopping.”
“Even though it’s been pretty awful – certainly the first bit of 2020 – we’ve also seen the best in people as a result,” she says. “In adversity, people in communities which are strong, pull together and, for me, that’s seeing the best side of humanity…”
This inspirational effort became a focal point for the way in which much of the media covered the floods, sometimes allowing them to ignore the real human tragedy that was unfolding and erase cuts and class inequality out of the picture.
One of the problems which communities in the Rhondda face is that while collective organisation on the ground is so effective, people have little control over major resources or the overall wealth in society. In the fifth richest country in the world, the poorest communities shouldn’t be left to fend for themselves in every crisis.
The challenge is not simply one of providing essential supplies to those in need, but utilising this organisational power to reverse decades of cuts and policies which have left the Valleys in a state of social deprivation. In one recent campaign, this became a reality.
When the local health board announced at the start of the year that it was seriously considering closing the local accident and emergency department at the Royal Glamorgan hospital, it generated a furious backlash in the Rhondda and beyond.
“It was a feeling of desperation, anger and really wanting to fight this decision,” says Sara Head, a retired Parylympian and community volunteer from Beddau who is involved in the Save Royal Glamorgan A&E campaign.
If emergency cover was lost, she says she would fear for people’s lives if they had to travel further afield.
“Time is of the essence,” Sara explains. “We have unfortunately poor health in the Rhondda and we also don’t have the transport links. The terrain over the mountains changes everyday and roads get closed, we also have higher levels of poverty.”
After years of being failed by a combination of state orchestrated cuts and a market-driven haemorrhaging of jobs and wealth, people snapped.
“I will never forget the rooms full of people at the meetings,” Sara tells me. “I went to a Llantrisant meeting and there was hundreds there, in the region of 300 plus. They said there was no seats left in any of the allocated rooms.”
She describes the passion with which people spoke, “telling stories of their lives being saved” at the Royal Glamorgan. When the children’s ward was shut last year, locals were told they’d always have A&E.
“The demonstrations showed people’s feeling[s],” says Sara. “Many couldn’t make it. The petitions too. It’s incredible seeing people wanting this so much and willing to help in so many ways.”
In early February – shortly before the floods – hundreds of people from the area descended on the steps of the Senedd in one of the biggest ever demonstrations to take place in Cardiff Bay.
The crowd angrily denounced both First Minister Mark Drakeford and Health Minister Vaughan Gething, at one point calling for his resignation. The rage felt towards the Welsh Labour administration has been palpable in the campaign, with many saying that closing the ward would represent an unforgivable act of betrayal from a party that claims the mantle of the NHS.
When Covid hit, many people thought one silver lining would be that the future of the A&E department would be secured. But a few weeks ago, the health board announced its closure was still a real possibility. After the flooding and Covid, it’s closure – against popular will – would be gut-wrenching, and the political consequences severe.
Leanne Wood knows all too well that Labour can’t take voters for granted here and that real political anger exists. She won her Rhondda seat in spectacular fashion after defeating the former Education Minister Leighton Andrews on a left wing platform, and was one of the few politicians who attempted to understand the Leave vote in the valleys as partly an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo, and one that couldn’t simply be dismissed.
Talking as to me in the middle of the Covid crisis, Wood admits that the Welsh Government’s recent diversion with Westminster over easing lockdown has won them back some respect, but still reckons that Labour will have a tough time in next year’s Senedd elections.
The full ramifications of all these issues and how they eventually play out will only become apparent in the months and years to come, but it’s undeniable that people are losing faith in the political system at large, and recent events have only served to highlight this.
“There’s no doubt that the Dominic Cummings affair has angered a lot of people,” Wood says, contrasting Cummings’ arrogance in defending his Durham trip to a constituent who came to her, agonising over whether he could travel to see a family member who was dying of cancer in lockdown.
Even the immediate political backlash from the decision not to shut down earlier – causing thousands of excess deaths in the name of protecting the economy – has not truly been witnessed yet. With flooding too, new issues are only now just emerging, and there is dismay that home insurance premiums have shot up for flood victims.
None of this – from the effects of floods to the loss of jobs – looks likes it’s accidental, but the product of a system that puts the needs of the market above human life and dignity.
By the time I visit Lewis street in Pentre, Boris Johnson is facing heavy criticism for not visiting victims of the flooding sooner, but standing next to Dean, his sister Vicky says she wouldn’t have wanted to see him regardless.
“It wouldn’t make no difference if he came here, because I hate the government anyway,” she says, adding the caveat that she’s “not politically minded.”
But even if this is the case, both Vicky and Dean take a strong stance against the recent arrival of Prince Charles in nearby Pontypridd.
“Alright, Prince Charles…it’s lovely of him to come down,” Vicky says. “But at the end of the day, we’ve [already] got people bringing food and drinks, and you can’t even get a cup of water from Prince Charles.”
Dean agrees that it was little more than a media stunt, in sharp contrast to the army of volunteers who rushed to help in practical ways and expected nothing in return.
“I gotta be honest with you,” he says. “you haven’t heard him say “oh, I’m gonna put my hand in my pocket.”
“He’s got so much money [but] he hasn’t done it… He’s supposed to be Prince of Wales you know.”
In this context, having Prince Charles deliver a message about climate change only made people here more sceptical about the environmental movement. I can’t help wondering how different this would have been had Greta Thunberg – who spoke at Bristol a week after I was in Pentre – visited flood victims here instead of Charles.
As it was, the sight of seeing the royal family swoop into their flood hit area, dressed in expensive gear and surrounded by an entourage, unsurprisingly elicits a combination of indignation and indifference from Dean and his sister Vicky. The combination of raw emotions means the situation is extremely volatile.
As he stands in his home, still with the stench of raw sewage swilling in the air, the weight of the moment comes crashing down on Dean once again.
“I saw my uncle this morning,” he says “I just broke down, coz I said sorry.” He begins to sob as his sister consoles him. “It’s not his fault is it,” she says.
Through his tears, Dean explains how all the family photos were destroyed in the flood. This house was his parents and everyone has fond memories of the good old days, when Dean says there were big New Years eve parties and family Christmases.
When his uncle – who used to take Dean to see Cardiff City play around the country – walked into the house, the look on his face was too much to take. Another family member, a former rugby player for Aberavon, broke down as soon as he walked through the door.
Dean is upfront about the impact this is having on his mental health. Like so many others, he will need treatment following this. What becomes abundantly clear, however, is that the people who came to help when he was in dire straits, saving his goats and bringing him food, weren’t just providing practical support, they have been a lifeline emotionally.
Without the community, it’s hard to think where Dean would be today. Thinking what all this means and where it goes, he suddenly grasps at a potential way forward.
“What my grandfather fought for when he was a miner, everything has gone,” he says. “It’s not like it used to be years and years ago, if you all stuck together, then it gets done.
“That’s what we tried to say in the meeting this week,” he continues, referring to one of the many “church hall” events that have taken place since the flooding began.”We want a committee to voice our stuff, against these people that have done this damage. Lets all get together.”
For the left in Wales, and an Independence movement growing out of an appetite for radical change, the challenge is how to relate to the thirst for democracy and renewal that Dean expresses, and how to use to it against an economic and political system which has completely failed.
