Britain battles to hold back devastating floods

GLOUCESTER, England, July 24 (Reuters) Emergency workers battled to hold back overflowing rivers after Britain's worst floods in 60 years engulfed villages and town streets and cut off fresh water supplies to hundreds of thousands of people.

Days of pouring rain have turned wide areas of central and western England into lakes, flooding 4,500 houses, threatening many more and leaving cars submerged. Harvesting of crops such as barley and rapeseed has been delayed and milk production and deliveries curtailed, sparking fears of food shortages.

In the western city of Gloucester, Ken Ticehurst, 41, said police had been guarding the doors to a local supermarket yesterday night to stop panic buying of bottled water after reports of fighting in local food stores.

''There's a weird feeling of being under siege,'' he told Reuters today.

Freak downpours have left many Britons, more used in recent years to record high summer temperatures, wondering if they are witnessing the impact of global warming. Other parts of Europe are enduring a heatwave that has killed 18 people in Romania and forced Greece to call a state of emergency.

Police, firefighters and the military fought a desperate all-night battle to hold back floodwaters from an electricity substation that supplies power to half a million people in the western English county of Gloucestershire.

They managed to keep the water out and the power running.

''The relentlessness of the rainfall this summer has been quite exceptional and the damage immense,'' Britain's National Farmers Union said in a report.

CLIMATE CHANGE Homeowners waded through knee-deep water surveying the damage to their homes. Insurers said these and similar June floods in northern England could raise claims of up to 2 billion pounds (4 billion dollars).

A break in days of rain brought hope to flood victims and others living in fear of the rising waters, driven by major rivers such as the Thames and the Severn; but officials said there could be more rain on the way.

''We're hopeful the worst has passed but it's hard to say,'' said Stuart Brennan, a spokesman for the government's Environment Agency.

The government has promised more money to help with drainage and flood defences, but it has been criticised for failing to act sooner to tackle failings in its flood defence plans.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who toured a flooded area yesterday, said some places had received a month's rainfall in an hour.

''Extreme events such as we have seen in recent weeks herald the spectre of climate change and it would be irresponsible to imagine that they won't become more frequent,'' Nick Reeves, executive director of The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, a scientific group, said.

But Alastair Borthwick, an engineering professor at Oxford University, said there was not enough data to judge whether climate change was a factor in the flooding.

Up to 350,000 people in Gloucester, Tewkesbury and Cheltenham may be without mains water for up to two weeks after pumps at a water treatment works were engulfed by water.

But most of the 43,000 homes that had their power cut off when an electricity substation was flooded were reconnected.

REUTERS GT KP1705