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Dailies mark 10 years since flood disaster with special microsite

A regional news platform marked 10 years since major flooding hit its patch with a dedicated microsite remembering the disaster.

Gloucestershire Live’s ‘The Floods – 10 years on’ project went live yesterday, featuring memories from the time and the story of the rescue and recovery effort in the floods’ aftermath.

The site also features ‘before and after’ pictures of various places in Gloucestershire, showing how they looked after the floods compared with how they look in 2017.

As well as the microsite, a special 16-page supplement also appeared in the Gloucester Citizen and Gloucestershire Echo.

Gloucester floods

Jenny Eastwood, editor of Gloucestershire Live and the Citizen, said: “Ten years ago, one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit Gloucestershire took place. More than two months’ rain fell in 24 hours leading to an unprecedented rescue effort and recovery operation. Three people died in the following days, thousands had no water or power and hundreds were left homeless.

“I was news editor at the time on the Citizen and it was a time no one will ever forget, and we felt we could not let this anniversary go past without marking the incredible efforts of the emergency services and volunteers to pull this county through in its hour of need. We also wanted to talk about the recovery which took place and the huge strides taken to ensure such devastation could never happen again.

“Months ago, we pulled together a project team of our head of web Tom Gibbon and two reporters, Ben Falconer and Robin Jenkins, who were both working here at the time of the floods, to oversee this coverage creating a special website dedicated to it.

“We knew it was a big undertaking as we wanted to do the community spirit and recovery effort justice, but we are extremely proud of the result. It has been very well received so far with so many people using it as a chance to share their own experiences of what happened.”

Last year, Gloucestershire Live’s Trinity Mirror sister website Wales Online set up a similar microsite marking 50 years since the Aberfan disaster.