For me the story unfolded just before 8AM when one of my neighbours posted a message on our local Whatsapp group about the cycle path being flooded. I had a look and it turned out I had a pretty good view of that area from my balcony. I saw, what I could only describe as looking similar to a white water rafting attraction at a theme park, flowing down the local cafe's terrace, over the cycle path into the river. I was then shocked to see that was only half of the problem. The other half of the flood was the other way, behind the pub, onto the local street. And we're not talking about a little leak here. It was gushing out at an alarming rate.
So I took some photos and videos with my camera and posted them on Twitter.
Thames Water and local media posted some tweets about a 36in pipe having burst.
Pictures emerged on Twitter from the car park flooding to the top. Now this is London so people normally don't use their car to go to work so my first thought was that most cars would still be inside. I later learned that the flood started the night before, so pretty much every car in that car park would have been stuck in the morning anyway.
As I was working from home that morning, I was able to check in every hour or so and post some further updates until midday when the flood was still in full flow and according to twitter alerts, Thames Water did not have a solution yet on how to stop, let alone fix the pipe burst.
Rescue services were wading waist deep through the street and cars parked on the street had their lights and wipers come on automatically, by the electrical shortcut caused by the flood waters reaching as high as the windshields.
Once I returned from work in the afternoon, the flow of water continued into the river, but the flow to the street had been slowed down with sandbags. Compared to the morning it seemed like hardly any water, but it was still more than what you'd expect in your average rainfall.
There will dozens of police cars, fire brigade trucks and all sorts of flood defence vehicles parked along Lea Bridge Road. Work lights and generators were going up and pumps were turned on to start what must be a long and difficult clean up operation.