ON a fine summer morning in the Brig, the popular Bridgend bar in Brechin, Scott and Amanda McNeill recall the events of October 2023, when the river South Esk rose over 20 feet during Storm Babet.
The McNeills were trapped in their flat over the bar they have owned for 20 years with their adult children. Built in 1972, the pub had never previously been flooded. The river wall nearby breached, and the pub quickly filled with dirty water, with the kitchen and bar area wrecked.
Scott McNeill says: “We lost a big ice machine, barrels, our fridge freezer.”
That was the situation on the Friday, when he phoned his insurance company to receive the welcome news that he was covered for flooding.
The next day, he recalls: “We had 50, 60 people here, the football team, and other community members. A local farmer took the debris away. It still brings a tear to my eye.”
Almost two years later, the McNeills now want to sell, but the value of the property has gone down.
“I’m not interested in profit, but we want shot of this now, it’s hard,” he says, with the fear of being flooded and having to start over being ever-present. Since then, the McNeills have not been able to obtain flood insurance.
Thirteen years on from the 2012 floods, flooding is the UK’s most frequent natural disaster, impacting lives, businesses and infrastructure for years after it happens. Yet, as The Ferret has found, looking at the aftermath as part of a six-country European journalism project, communities affected, as in Brechin, often feel inadequately supported. They direct blame at local politicians and councils even when they are not directly responsible, and find navigating a fragmented flood management system difficult and frustrating.
Carol Raeburn, the director of the charitable organisation, the Scottish Flood Forum (SFF), tells The Ferret that whereas elsewhere in Scotland, more affluent communities had a greater ability to recover, in Angus, it has not been so easy.
“You are dealing with a real trauma, especially for those who have experienced flooding on more than one occasion,” she says.
The mental health effects of the aftermath of Covid, she adds, also had an effect.
Just down the road, on River Street, Scott Murray is at the Eastmill Caravan site where he is still clearing up the site, and we walk round to the sound of hammering, the smell of fresh paint.
“By 5pm, the water was halfway along River Street. Then I heard this noiseless rumble and the water started coming through and it didn’t stop.” He evacuated residents himself.
The next morning, he returned to devastation. Twelve caravans and three flats were underwater, and his own house on the site was flooded. He has only three residents living there now. Recovery from flooding is an expensive business.
“I had to strip the caravans back to bare bones,” he says. “We have mopped them to death with disinfectant, sprayed for mould. It will be another year before I am sorted.” He is not sure if his family business can survive another flood.
Council community worker Jennifer Anderson was one of the first people on the scene to help with the clear-up.
“I’ve never seen it as bad as that,” she explains from the Crickety, the community centre that ended up as the hub for the recovery from flooding. “I think the fact it happened during the night meant that people didn’t evacuate.”
Ian Stewart has walked up from River Street to discuss recent issues around building and insurance. Stewart grew up on the street and remembers playing in the floods. But, he says: “This was the worst ever”.
He explains that he and his wife Jane had lost almost everything as the water poured in, including important paperwork.
Residents like Stewart have been inundated with automated reminders to pay bills for properties, even when they were not able to live there.
Anderson adds: “It’s really stressful for them, to see final demands, or TV licensing … People had lost their glasses, medication, they didn’t have phone chargers so they couldn’t tell people they were safe.”
In Brechin, once people had left the community campus centre at the high school, they were decanted, or moved, many to different towns and villages. But returning to the area of River Street hasn’t been easy either because in places like Brechin, which flood again and again, uncertainty about the future haunts decision-making.
The council has decided not to call for full managed retreat, although ruined council housing will not be filled, and the council is consulting on demolition of some dwellings, relocation and remodelling, and has decided to increase the height of the river wall.
Yet all are well aware that with climate change, nobody can guarantee that Brechin will not be flooded again.
Further afield, in the rest of Scotland, things are not easy either. In May 2024, then cabinet secretary for net zero and energy, Màiri McAllan, launched a consultation on Scotland’s first flood resilience strategy, saying, “Flooding is Scotland’s biggest climate adaptation challenge”.
The strategy, published later that year, looks at how landscapes can adapt to increase “resilience”; support more flood actions like smaller flood protection schemes; involve more partners, including communities, and improve data, as well as signalling a move to “transition planning for our most exposed communities”.
Scotland’s flood risk management policies have evolved, and the fact that Scottish Water is publicly owned and that there are few tiers of government are advantages, says Sarah Hendry, professor of water policy at the University of Dundee.
Hendry tells The Ferret that Scotland and England have always had separate laws and policies for water.
“The population is less than a tenth of England and the spread is larger. That affects all sorts of things to do with water policy, resources and flood management.
“It also means England has a much more complex administrative structure than we do, and that makes it much more layered.”
She adds that public ownership of water and the fewer layers of local authority means “it makes it easier to have policy synergy and it takes the motive for shareholder interest out of the policy focus”.
The 32 local authorities are responsible for surface water and gullies, and they work in partnership with Scottish Canals and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). But despite the stripped-down nature of accountability, some of those affected by flooding still feel that it is not always clear who is responsible.
Further afield, across Europe, our team has found that social disadvantage is one of the key barriers to people recovering from flooding. And it’s going to get more challenging out there.
In 2024, the European Environment Agency reported that weather extremes across Europe are worsening, with the continent being the fastest-warming continent. Around two million people across central Europe were affected by serious flooding in September last year; in October, more than 200 people were killed during flooding in Valencia, Spain, which also wrecked homes and businesses.
Down the coast in the town of Montrose, Angus Council faces additional major issues with coastal erosion. The dunes that protect the town are a natural coastal flood barrier, but they are being eaten away by the power of the sea.
Gaps in the dunes once opened up could become flood corridors into the town, especially around the low-lying areas near the world-famous golf course.
Along the coastal path, council workers highlight how they are both monitoring erosion and trying out different management strategies. But they are working against time, with a University of Glasgow study reporting in April 2025 that some of the fastest known rates of change on record were measured during the winter of 2023/24.
Vicky Whitecross has lived there all her life and has seen the landscape she grew up with change around her. “The dunes are what protect Montrose,” she says “Montrose is surrounded by water, the Montrose Basin, the two Esk rivers, some of the town is below sea level. The dunes are what keep Montrose out of the sea.”
The strategy to protect Montrose from flooding includes dune restoration, beach nourishment and beach recharge. Rock armour is a short-term strategy, but is also being used to reduce sand being lost on the beach. But residents like Whitecross feel that the sea is against them.
“The waves are taking the sand and it’s not being replaced,” she says.
IT is a stark picture for those who love the landscapes in which they have lived for their whole lives, or for generations before.
Larissa Naylor, professor of geomorphology and environmental geography at the University of Glasgow, is part of the Dynamic Coast project, funded by the Scottish Government to look at coastal change.
She says: “We need to prepare for the change that we know is coming.”
“We may need to move people out of flood plains. And we are going to have to accept people coming from those places, who are internal climate migrants,” she says.
“We are not going to be able to control nature in the same way in the future.”
It would be easy to despair about flooding – the long-term effects, economic and health, the growing challenge of climate change, the lack of money to address an issue that will only grow in significance.
But there are some exciting and innovative ways of addressing flood events. Raeburn points to “a suite of options” and praises the work of the flood group in the village of Edzell, near Brechin.
It is possible to recover from a flood event with support, she says, and the power of community is at the heart of it.
This project, After The Floods, is part of a six country European investigation, looking at how communities weather flooding – and how authorities are meeting the challenge of rising floodwaters and increasing coastal erosion. The production of this investigation was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund
