Workers were on Thursday beginning to clear thousands of tons of mud and rock from a main road in Scotland, a day after two massive landslides left more than 50 people stranded.
Motorists had to be winched to safety by helicopter after the landslides blocked two parts of the A85 motorway in central Scotland and washed several cars down the hillside.
At the same time, a massive clear-up was also continuing in Cornwall, south-west England, where the tourist village of Boscastle was devastated on Monday by a huge flash flood.
No one was injured in Wednesday’s landslide but rescued travellers said they watched terrified as torrents of debris poured down the hillsides towards their vehicles.
”We saw it come down the hill. It was horrific. The ground shook and there was an enormous roar,” said 54-year-old Ian Oates.
”There was just a wall of mud and water. It started coming down the road towards us. We started to scramble up the hill to get out of its way,” he told Britain’s Press Association news agency.
”We could hear more rumbling above us, everyone was panicking, and it looked like the whole hill was coming down.”
Some people managed to get past the first landslide, only to drive straight into a bigger one.
”We heard a massive rumble and leapt out of the car,” said another witness, Shona Maxwell.
”It was incredible — water, trees, mud and boulders, all coming down the hillside. If we hadn’t turned around when we did, we would have been swept away in it.”
The road, at the western tip of Loch Earn, north of the city of Stirling, was drenched by a huge band of rain that swept up through Scotland on Wednesday afternoon.
In all, 57 people were airlifted to safety by Royal Air Force helicopter crews and spent the night at nearby villages.
The landslides and the floods in Cornwall coincided with huge storms across other parts of western Europe that havve killed nine people in southern France this week. — Sapa-AFP