A video of the impact of flooding in south Galway, particularly Labane, Tirneevin (near Gort) and Coole Park, including pictuures of previous flooding events in the same areas.
It rains a lot in Galway, and this year has been the wettest December for more than half a century, according to Met Eireann. To the south of the city are the villages of Oranmore, Ardrahan, Labane and Kinvara as well as the town of Gort. They all lie in an area full of turloughs and marshes, and every winter, there is a certain amount of flooding in these areas. The difference between summer and winter are dramatic – summer meadows are transformed into lakes by mid-winter. However, the flooding this winter is set to exceed the flooding in 2009 which had been the worst in a generation.
This is a picture of the castle at Castlequarter, near Gort. This picture was taken in mid-January, 2006. In the background, just to the right of a utility pole, can be seen a building on the hill behind – it’s the clubhouse for Gort golf club. The following image – taken on exactly the same date (Jan 15th) a year earlier – is taken from the same spot – again you can see the golf club building to the right of the castle on the skyline . The turlough is full but the roadway (from where I took both pictures) is still passable).
This year, that road is under water, so I can’t take a comparative image (the video above shows two canoeists making their way down the same road).( that clubhouse, looking down at the castle. Instead, I took a picture (below) from the clubhouse, looking down at the castle. As you can see, there is simply a lake where the fields were, and the roadway from where I took the first picture is under about 10 feet of water too (that’s the outskirts of Gort in the background). The electricity pole mark the line of the road.
