A farm worker who “saved his house from flooding” by building a wall of dung across his driveway.
Tommy Cannon decided to improvise when heavy rain caused a stream to burst its banks and send water gushing towards his home near Castle Douglas.
The 38-year-old claims he couldn’t drive to town for sandbags so at around midday he used manure from work to “save his home from being flooded”.
A viral video showed a digger dropping piles of brown fertiliser across his driveway as he laughs and says “you know you’re a farmer when you’re using dung as a flood defence”.
Many Facebook users praised his “quick thinking” and said that “sometimes emergencies call for desperate measures”.
However others said they were surprised environment officials hadn’t paid him a visit as they feared his barricade could have contaminated local water.
One enraged farmer, known as Dan, blamed actions like Tommy’s for the “red tape” around spreading manure on fields.
Tommy hit back before sharing a video of his flooded driveway, back garden and the fields behind to show how bad the situation had become. He’s since explained he “did what he had to do” after his area faced four inches of rain in 12 hours and claims he cleaned everything up by 10.30am the next morning.
The following day he posted a photo of his clear drive, saying the dung was back in storage and his drive has been washed before asking if there’s anything else disgruntled farmer Dan would like him to do.
Tommy said: “It was what I had to do to save my house. It was the only thing I had to block the road. It wasn’t possible to get to town by the road so I couldn’t get sandbags.
“I realise there’s a lot of people who will say it’s irresponsible, but with the amount of water going down the road it would have been well diluted and nobody would notice a thing.”
