FEATURE ???


n By Hajera Blagg


In a Landworker exclusive we meet the Unite heroes who took on Storm Ciarán – despite being very poorly equipped


Flooding unleashed by Storm Ciarán in October devastated villages and towns up and down Northern Ireland. Newry and Downpatrick were among the worst hit, with hundreds of homes and businesses severely damaged. Rivers reached record levels and the destruction in some areas has been called ‘unprecedented’.


Weeks later, many businesses are counting the cost of the disaster, with everything they’d worked so hard for now gone. Some residents too have returned to unlivable homes.


Workers employed by the Rivers Agency, an executive agency of the Department of Infrastructure (DfI), were among those who toiled round the clock during Storm Ciarán to manage the flooding and save as much as they could.


But Rivers Agency workers have been treading water – both literally and figuratively – as they’ve battled to do their jobs amid years of underinvestment in the service.


Unite member and Rivers Agency worker John* – who has asked us not


to use his real name – has spoken to Landworker exclusively on condition of anonymity. He paints a shocking picture of a service that’s severely understaffed and under-resourced. John said that when the storm hit, it was initially “disorganised chaos”.


“We did get it together very quickly but at the start it was everyone running around everywhere,” he explained. The speed with which he and his colleagues coordinated their response was exceptional – “It was one of the better floodings we’d attended to in terms of how quickly we got ourselves organised,” John said – but they were up against the unparalleled ferocity of Storm Ciarán.


“The storm and the flooding that followed was incredibly powerful and it became problematic very quickly,” he explained. “No one was prepared for how bad it would be. Especially in Downpatrick, no one was prepared at


all because flooding of that scale had never happened there before.”


John and his colleagues’ daily job involves maintaining rivers to prevent


flooding – when John spoke to Landworker, he had just finished pulling out trees that had washed downriver and blocked a bridge. But the day that Storm Ciarán hit, their role became a reactive one, as they scrambled to put hundreds upon hundreds of sandbags in place to protect homes and businesses.


You’d think that these workers, who in effect serve as emergency responders, would be properly equipped by their employers. But because of the lack of investment, for John and his colleagues, it was like bringing a butter knife to a sword fight.


“For the 24 hours that we were out, we worked in crews of only five people,” he explained. “We aren’t given standard equipment like sat navs in our vehicles, so we had to use our personal mobiles to find where we were going. Newry and Downpatrick are on the other end of the country for us so it was incredibly difficult finding very specific locations in these areas.”


John highlighted too the lack of head torches working outside in the dark of night. They each had to carry two 20 kilo sandbags at any given time – the equivalent of carrying two Siberian huskies – while somehow managing to also carry and manipulate a handheld torch.


In the end, John’s crew of five workers distributed over 1,500 sandbags, among many other tasks like setting up pumps. They left home at 8 o’clock in the morning and didn’t get home until 8am the next day, with only minutes for a break for cups of tea provided by Red Cross volunteers.


“The people of Newry also kindly provided us with food, but we didn’t have much chance to eat,” John added.


But for all their Herculean efforts, they 11 uniteLANDWORKER Winter 2023/24


received no recognition. In fact, much the opposite – online, they received outright abuse.


John told Landworker he was crestfallen and deeply hurt to see Facebook post after Facebook post written by local residents claiming that DfI workers were nowhere to be seen amid the disaster.


“Not only were we there, we were the very first people to arrive to respond to the floods,” John explained. “I’m not at all knocking the fire service but I saw online posts saying ‘thank God for the fire service’ because they ran two pumps all night. But over that same period, we ran up to 16 pumps.”


John said he doesn’t fault local residents’ frustration – rather, it is the Rivers Agency’s lack of public visibility, fueled by chronic underinvestment, that is to blame. And since John and his colleagues are considered part of the civil service, they aren’t permitted to publicly defend themselves.


“I just wish people knew what we do – I wish they knew that we even exist,” he said.


The thanklessness of their jobs is compounded by low pay, John highlights.


“No one goes to work for the Rivers Agency for the money. We do it to help people. But the pay is so low that no one wants to work for us. Our people are earning from the minimum wage up to £12 an hour. These are people who are carrying sandbags in the


Alamy


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40