Warned to expect at least two more days without electricity following the weekend’s floods, Lancaster’s hardy residents faced the darkness with sunny stoicism.

“I was telling my kids, this is what it must have been like in the war,” said Rohina Caterina, surveying the muddy floor of her pub, the Stonewell Tavern, which closed on Saturday night when the cellars flooded. “We’ll get through it.”

Friends popped by to offer help with the clear-up on Sunday, as her neighbour, James Howard, recalled the chaos of the previous evening. He had to close his takeaway business, Go Burrito, after water from the river Lune flooded the kitchen.

“You should have seen it out here,” he said, gesturing to the debris-strewn Church Street. “It was like the zombie apocalypse. Drunk people were diving in the water, it was crazy. There was a rescue dinghy coming up North Road and cars were floating past.”

Caterina laughed in disbelief: “Outside the pub people were saying ‘Let’s go and rob some shops – the CCTV won’t be working.’”

Down the road, Joe Ruddock looked despondent. His pub, the Toll House Inn on Penny Street, only opened this week, after a pricey refurbishment. When the power died on Saturday night, none of his diners could pay their bills because the card machine stopped working. “There’s an £800 bill for a table of 18 I doubt will ever be paid now,” he said. The only upside was that all 28 rooms ended up occupied after guests found themselves stranded. “But who knows what will happen in the coming days. I don’t know if people will turn up or not and I can’t phone them to warn them about the situation.”

Howard expected his burrito business to be out of action for the rest of the year. “It’s a disaster for us coming at what should be our busiest time of the year,” he said. “Not only will we have to pay thousands to get our electrics sorted, but we’ve lost all of our stock because the fridges are off. It’s a nightmare.”

On Sunday, calm had been restored. With mobile networks down and phone batteries long dead, students queued up to use Lancaster’s few remaining telephone boxes for the first time in their lives. Others lined up patiently for a cup of tea from the Salvation Army van.

The cash machines were all out of order, but there was nowhere to spend money. Only the Beer Store on Church Street remained open, doing such a roaring trade in warm lager and cigarettes that they had to implement a one-in, one-out policy.

Traffic lights failed, causing tailbacks all the way to Galgate, by the M6.

On Saturday night, life boats were bobbing around the one-way system, ferrying patients from the bottom of town to the Royal Lancaster Infirmary (RLI) at the top. The hospital had been running on generator power since 11pm, when Lancaster’s electricity substation flooded, plunging 55,000 homes and businesses into darkness.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Electricity North West had invested £500,000 in flood defences at the Lancaster substation back in 2010, ostensibly to protect it against what they called “once-in-100-years” floods. Yet they were no match for Storm Desmond. On Sunday afternoon, the energy company was working with the fire service to work out how safely to enter the substation so that engineers could repair the damage.

When the flood waters receded from the city centre, a layer of mud and debris was left at the bottom end of town, by the bus station. Up the other end, a standby battalion from the Weeton barracks near Blackpool was stationed outside the RLI, khaki trucks doubling as ambulances for patients in hard-to-reach areas.

Soldiers moved one woman in a coma from the Victoria hospital in Morecambe to the RLI after all the road bridges over the river Lune between Morecambe and Lancaster shut due to flood damage. On Sunday night, the only way to cross was via the Carlisle footbridge or a long detour on the M6.

A crowd gathered outside Sainsbury’s by the river where the supermarket had turned into a carb-heavy food bank, with staff handing out free baps and loaves of bread.

James Melody, 20, and his girlfriend, Esme Moxley, also 20, were happy to have got their hands on a brown loaf. They could not quite believe what they had seen, walking through the city centre. “It’s so weird to see people using phoneboxes. I wouldn’t know how,” said Melody.

“I think the only time I’ve used one was when I was little, to do prank phone calls,” said Moxley, who was wondering how she would get back to her home in Leeds, with no trains running north of Preston and Lancaster station closed.

Elsewhere, the blitz spirit reigned. Outside his house on Greaves Road, teacher Piers Napper was cooking scrambled eggs on a camping stove. “I rescued it from the garage in the dark this morning,” he said. “We’re hoping the gas will last until we get power back.”



On Upper Church Street, the emergency units of the Salvation Army were dishing out cups of tea and soup. Among them was a heavily pregnant nurse, Dina Filippou, 25, whose baby is due in two weeks. “We are hoping the power will come back on soon,” she said.