Yesterday the fire, today the flood

The burn beside my mother's house burst its banks about teatime today, and flooded the road. By the time we got back it had receded a little, but we'd had to drive through a major flood to get there. The water was still lapping around the dustbins, and had evidently reached the garage door, which held fast.

A major rainstorm in the morning, which blotted out the loch from view, as well as knocking out the internet, was combined with further rain in the afternoon, and proved too much for the local burns (streams). This shot was one I captured around lunchtime before the bursting of the banks.

By the time we got home we could hear rocks hurtling down the concrete channel of the burn beside our house. My mother knows a Gaelic speaker, who tells her that the Gaelic name for the burn before it was renamed, was 'the burn of the drums'.
An Oban Times reporter turned up and interviewed my mother. Neither of us had seen such a great flood since moving here in 1977 : the last one, which swept away much of the garden and re-landscaped the bay, was in 1953, after the Great Storm.
I have sent him this image.

Later, I went down to the beach and had a shouted conversation across the burn where it flows into the sea, with a dog walker who is a near-neighbour. He had come home from work and immediately had to start baling out his garden and stop the plants from being swept away.

My immediate reaction when we got home was to feel fearful, because my mother was following close behind us and would have had to aquaplane through the floodwaters at the neighbouring house. I felt fine once she had arrived, but later I realised that the Great Floods of Gloucestershire in 2007, and the Great Flooding of my Flat in London in 1991, have probably left their tidemark on me.

The fire I referred to in the title was a grill pan fire in the kitchen yesterday, started by my niece trying to warm up a scone. We've now bought some smoke alarms.