Sheffield flooding: Businessman describes how close premises beside River Sheaf came to being inundated

Firma-Chrome Surface Engineering is located beside the River Sheaf on Saxon Road in Lowfield, Sheffield, where a flood warning was issued on Sunday night and remained in place this morning.

Its managing director Phil Marsden told how he lives in Chesterfield but had driven to the plant on Sunday evening after being alerted by a collegue about the flood warning.

He arrived at around 7pm to find water gushing past the back of the building just one foot below the floor level.

The river was still raging on Monday morning but the water level had dropped by around three feet since its peak, and with no further heavy rainfall forecast for Monday, Firma-Chrome and other businesses and homes in the area appeared to have been narrowly spared any major damage.

Mr Marsden said: “In the summer, the river’s about two inches deep here, it’s fairly still and you can see the fish.

“When I got here on Sunday evening it was about a foot below getting into the building. It was pretty hairy.”

Mr Marsden, who said they had sandbags at the ready, told how the plant had been flooded previously, in 2007 and again a few years later, but on both occasions that was from water running off Saxon Road and down to the river rather than from the river itself bursting its banks.

Across the road at Wolf Safety Lamp Company, a member of staff explained that they had put up their relatively newly-installed flood defences but had already taken them down this morning.