Severn Sound, GCap’s Gloucester-based radio station, found its power and running water knocked out by the flooding this week and had to relocate its operations to its stablemate GWR in Bristol.
As the flooding put a local substation out of action, the whole team packed up and moved to Bristol to continue their round-the-clock coverage of the crisis.
Duncan Cook, news editor at Severn Sound, said: ‘It’s the first time this has happened in the six years I’ve been here. We’ve never had to move the whole station before. We won’t be able to go back until we have water back on.”
Cook said his staff had been lucky not to be badly affected by the flooding, but that they have all been putting in long hours. ‘Everyone has dug in deep. We’re doing shifts of at least 12 hours. It’s quite exciting – it’s not often we get a story like this. In fact, nothing like this has happened before,’he said.
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BBC Radio Gloucester has so far been lucky enough to escape being affected by the flooding, but as the emergency services continued their battle to keep the water out of its local substation, there was an emergency generator at the ready.
Graham Day, news editor at BBC Radio Gloucester, said: ‘We have the emergency crews, the army and the navy all trying to keep the water out of the sub-station. The generator will be able to keep us going until we are able to relocate.”
With Gloucester the worst-hit county, BBC Radio Gloucester, as a small station with limited resources, has been at full stretch, said Day.
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‘It is a simple case that in the newsroom you throw everything away that you would be normally doing, and you simply react to what is happening around you,’he said.
‘We have journalists who it’s difficult to send home because they want to stay and be part of the coverage, so everybody is working above and beyond the call of duty.”
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