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Flashback to last week’s front page: Majella Fitzgerald pictured chest-high in the floodwater surrounding her home at Inchinapallas, Fermoy. Photo: Ellen Lynch

As floodwater finally subsided from the home of Catherine Quirke in Knockanduff, Rathcormac this week, she began the dispiriting process of cleaning up.

The water level dropped considerably after Cork County Council put in a pump on a lower road to help drain it away from her single-story bungalow which she'd completely renovated in recent years. Otherwise Catherine's home could have suffered even worse damage as heavy rain this week continued to add to water levels locally.

Catherine was forced to move out as floodwater poured into the house and came up through the floodboards. She's been staying with family members in Fermoy.

They were helping Catherine get started on the clean up this week. She described the inside of her home as being 'an awful mess' and said it would take a long time for it to dry out and the damage to be put right. For now, she said, she's coping by taking things 'one day at a time'.

While Cork County Council has no statutory responsibility for flooding of land and private property, their senior area engineer Brendan O'Gorman said  this week that, as an emergency response agency and on a humanitarian basis, they provided immediate and short term responses at Knockanduff.

They put in a diesel pump last Thursday morning, leaving it running until Saturday. "This was done as a humanitarian response only once we had agreement from the landowners down on the lower road to receive the pumped water on an emergency basis only," he explained.

Before that they'd broken down a roadside ditch on both sides of the lower road, again with the owner's agreement, to allow the groundwater to dissipate before they placed hosing in a trench across the road. "This allowed the groundwater levels up at Quirke's to reduce considerably from Monday," the engineer said.

He stressed that the measures were not a long term solution. He understood that discussions were planned privately with the various landowners in the area and the homeowner and her representatives to come to an agreement to deal with what he described as 'dangerously high groundwater levels'.

Cork County Council will continue to deal proactively with each landowner and to continually advise their elected members to seek a remedy there," the engineer advised.

Over in Inchinapallas, off the Kilworth Road in Fermoy this week, Majella Fitzgerald said she was 'just looking for a mircacle at this stage'. The road and fields around her home are still deeply flooded. In fact the situation has worsened and the family can no longer go through a neighbour's garden and through fields at the back to get into their home. 

"It's a desperate situation. You'd be fed up having to go through fields and having to put on wellingtons and wet gear each time," Majella said. It's the reason they've begun negotiating their way in and out from the road at the far side of their house even though it too is flooded at one point.

Majella is not feeling sorry for herself though. "Look, there are people worse off than us, people whoses houses were flooded. We're lucky, ours was not. The Council have been out, they've looked at it but there's nothing they can do," she said. She's resigned to having to wait for the water to subside naturally. She confessed though to having had sleepless nights worrying about the water rising even more, whenever there's been more rain forecast.

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