On August 12, 1996, Folkestone was hit by a massive summer thunderstorm which dropped two months rainfall on the town in the space of just two hours.

Flood waters were two metres deep in places, and the emergency services rescued people from upper windows by boat. Reporter Rhys Griffiths looks back on those events, and learns why authorities are urging people to be prepared for flooding in the future…

The first sign of the impending deluge was the water streaming under the back door.

Amanda Halstead, 31 at the time and pregnant with her fifth child, was at home in Black Bull Road with her husband Darren and 18-month-old daughter Jordan.

She was alarmed by the sight of the water entering their property, and at first wondered if there was a leak somewhere causing it to flow into the house.

“I opened the back door – big mistake,” Amanda recalled. “It just started to come in, so I shut the back door, put some towels down, which were completely ineffective.”

Folkestone had been hit by a huge summer storm, which swept in from across the Channel and deposited four inches of rain on the town in the space of just two hours.

“Within 20 minutes of that it was coming through the letterbox of the front door,” Amanda said. “It was filling up really, really quickly. So I grabbed what I needed, grabbed whatever I thought I needed at that time, and went upstairs.

“We were sitting there dumbfounded, watching this whole area fill up with water really, really fast. Then we could hear banging on the wall, so we went out of the bathroom window, we had a flat roof where there was a small extension on the building.

“We had an elderly couple living next door to us, and it was the wife and she said, ‘could you help, my husband is trapped, he's downstairs, he can't get out, he's trapped’.

“So Darren, being the guy that he is, dived off the top of the flat roof into the water, swam through their back door and found him, and he was literally neck deep in the water.

“He had Wellington boots on which had filled up with water and was trapped by a floating fridge-freezer, so he really couldn't move, he was quite a frail gentleman at the time.

“But Darren managed to get him upstairs and stayed with his wife for a bit while they sorted things out, and of course Darren had to swim back to come back in.”

The torrential rain which fell with such intensity on August 12, 1996, was more than the town could cope with. The Pent stream, which runs through Folkestone to the sea, burst its banks and drainage infrastructure was overwhelmed.

Homes and businesses at the bottom of Black Bull Road, where the Halsteads lived, were among the worst affected. The flood waters were as much as two metres deep in places, and emergency services used boats to help rescue those who were stranded.

“In that moment you're not really thinking about the reasons as to why this is happening, that's sort of retrospective,” Amanda reflected, 28 years later.

“All you're thinking about is, ‘this house is filling up with water, I need to get up to a higher level, and I need to make sure I've got everything I need for the baby’.

“I made sure she had drinks and snacks because I didn't know how long we were going to be up there. My main priority was her.

“It was phenomenal to be honest, because you can't comprehend what's happening at the time. I honestly thought it was going to reach the second floor at one point because it was right up to the top of the stairs.

“I did think it would but it didn't, it sort of settled there and just stayed there, and then obviously we were taken by boat out of the window. I mean, it sounds mad.”

Although the deluge that hit that day was a once-in-a-generation event, the Environment Agency (EA) is still warning people in Folkestone – especially in the areas close to the Pent stream – to be aware of the danger of flash flooding.

The Pent is designated as a ‘rapid response catchment’, which is a designation applied to water courses which are prone to respond rapidly to sudden, heavy rainfall.

Educational events have been held in local schools, and on August 2 the EA staged an awareness event in Folkestone town centre encouraging people living in at-risk areas to sign up to a flood alerts service.

Emily Whittingham, a flood resilience engagement advisor with the EA, told KentOnline: “It's a catchment that will respond really quickly to heavy rainfall like the summer thunderstorms that we have in this country.

“Back in 1996 there was one of these flash floods where a big storm came in from the continent, and basically dropped all its water on top of Folkestone, where there was four inches of rain that fell in under two hours, which is about two months worth of rainfall.

“The Pent is a bit like a hidden flood risk. In a lot of places the river Pent is hidden underground and you can't actually see it.

“In terms of its geography, you're quite at risk of those thunderstorms that come off the continent because they travel over the Channel, they pick up a lot of water and then as soon as they get onto land and hit the hills behind Folkestone the clouds rise and as they rise that's when they drop their water.

“So that's why Folkestone is so susceptible to that heavy rainfall. You have those hills behind us, they are quite steep, the rain can run really fast off of those hills.

“Folkestone is a very urban catchment as well, so there is a lot of concrete, and roads that seem to channel the water down as well when it rains, and again the Pent doesn't have that natural floodplain there anymore, so the water has to go somewhere. And unfortunately sometimes the Pent will flood.”

When the flood waters in 1996 subsided, those whose properties had been deluged were faced with the task of clearing up the damage left behind.

Amanda recalls how the family, like many others, lost everything that was touched by the flood water, which was contaminated by raw sewage. But the community and local charities rallied around, and many items were donated to help people get back on their feet.

“I was incredibly sad and incredibly upset because our whole lives had been turned upside down,” Amanda, now 59 and living in Dover, said.

“It was something that was forced on us, it was a force of nature, nobody could have predicted it, nobody would have predicted that until it happened. I don't think anybody was to blame, it was actually an act of God, as they call it.

“I think from the initial water coming in the back door to it being at the top of the stairs was around 20 minutes. That very short period of time for that amount of water to enter your home.”

Since the 1996 floods there have been improvements made to local infrastructure to mitigate the risk of a repeat of those dramatic scenes.

But Ms Whittingham is urging people locally to ensure they are as prepared as they can possibly be for any future flood events.

“Although we do have a flood warning service in place for the Pent stream at Folkestone, we might not have time to warn you because it can happen so quickly, particularly on those really heavy thunderstorms,” she said.

“So it's really important that people know what to do and how they can prepare for such flooding.

“It's being aware, knowing the signs, looking out for those severe weather reports that you get from the Met Office.

“Also, the Pent stream itself, where it isn’t culverted, look for rising water levels, if the water's churning, dark, brown and murky in colour, that could be a sign that actually it's starting to rise and could potentially flood.

“With climate change we're going to have hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters, and we are going to have more of these freak rainfall events.

“There are going to be more of these storms, our climate is changing, the weather is changing, and that's what we've got to be aware of for the future.

You can sign up to receive flood warnings here.

“We've just got to make sure we know what to do in a flood because we can't stop flooding unfortunately, it's something that we have to manage and live with and hopefully if we all know what to do to look after ourselves and our communities we can make a difference.

“So if the worst were to happen we can recover quicker and get back to our normal lives.”