IN July 2007, Oxfordshire suffered its worst floods in living memory.

Exactly 10 years on, Oxford is about to embark on the biggest flood prevention scheme in the city's history, in no small part influenced by that year's events.

In the second of our features marking the anniversary, Environment Reporter Pete Hughes looks at what happened when the floods reached Oxford – and what has changed in the decade since.

ON TUESDAY, July 24, 2007, thousands of people across West Oxfordshire were left to pick up the pieces of their lives after the most devastating floods they had ever seen.

Hundreds of people who had been forced to flee their homes returned to assess the damage: floors, carpets and furniture ruined; electrical appliances destroyed and gardens turned into swamps.

People in Oxford already knew that record rainfall which had fallen in Gloucestershire and the west of the county was slowly but surely swelling the tributaries that feed the Thames, and some kind of flooding was inevitable.

What they could not have predicted was the sheer scale of the disaster.

To make matters worse, on that day west Oxford was battered with a further seven inches of rain in 24 hours.

As flood experts have long known, Oxford suffers far worse from flooding than other cities of a similar size because the seven rivers and streams which feed into the city are funnelled into a small but narrow valley at the bottom of Abingdon Road, which acts as a dam for the entire city.

Abingdon and Botley Road were both quickly inundated and police had to evacuate 250 homes – mostly in west Oxford.

The Oxford Mail offices in Osney Mead were almost cut off when Ferry Hinksey Road was inundated and our printing had to be switched from Oxford to Brighton.

Deadlines were pulled forward six hours in case a worsening situation prevented the next day's edition getting out.

On July 25, The Government pledged a further £10m to help battle the floods in addition to the £14m promised by Prime Minister Gordon Brown earlier in the month.

In Bridge Street, on Osney Island, Bill Bowell and his wife Edna were forced to flee the home they bought 46 years before and where they raised their five children.

The following year, Mr Bowell, then 75, told the Oxford Mail: "I never expected to see water rising inside our house.

"The water ended up coming through the back door of the house, running through the front door. I remember my daughter turning to me and saying, 'dad, you cannot stay here'."

One person who remembers the events all-too-clearly is Peter Rawcliffe, who six months later helped set up Oxford Flood Alliance in response.

He was then living with his wife Maggie at the same house in South Hinksey where they live today.

Having already suffered floods in 2000 and 2003, they had replaced their carpets with stone floors and installed a flood pump to get the water out as soon as possible.

But, as he recalls, there was still no way of stopping it getting in.

He recalled: "In South Hinksey we could see the stream breaking its banks then we just had to watch the water getting closer up the fields over two or three days.

"We were standing our furniture in margarine tubs or yoghurt pots, and for big things like the dining room table we asked a neighbour to come and help put the legs in ice cream tubs.

"Even if you've got things like a flood pump, you're still worrying the pump is going to cut out. We couldn't get out of the front door and the cats were stuck upstairs for days."

By Thursday, July 26, an estimated 1,600 homes across Oxfordshire had been flooded and about 40,000 sandbags handed out.

A year later, 200 Oxfordshire families were still shut out of their homes.

Across the country, the foods had claimed 13 lives and devastated huge areas.

On August 8, 2007, the Government appointed Secretary of State for the Environment Sir Michael Pitt to chair an independent review into the floods.

His full report made 92 recommendations about flood predictions, prevention and emergency management which he said must be implemented if communities were to be better protected.

Perhaps more significantly for Oxford, in November of that year Peter Rawcliffe and a group of other residents from around the city convened the first ever meeting of the Oxford Flood Alliance, at the Waterman's Arms (now the Punter) on Osney Island.

Its aim was simple: to reduce flood risk in the Oxford area.

Looking back, realistically, Dr Rawcliffe says the alliance would never have happened were it not for those floods.

"In a way, the 2007 floods did people a favour: there is nothing like a flood to get action against flooding – it was the trigger that woke people up."

In the 10 years since that meeting, Oxford Flood Alliance has arguably done more than any other group to get agencies in power to take action: largely this has been through what Dr Rawcliffe calls 'gently prodding' the Environment Agency into installing countless culverts, dredging streams and weirs and building flood barriers like the hump at the bottom of Earl Street.

Now it is helping the EA to plan the biggest of them all – the Oxford Flood Alleviation Scheme: a 5km channel running from Botley Road to Sandford on Thames which is designed to carry flood waters away from the city centre then feed them safely back into the Thames.

If and when it is completed (which is supposed to be in the next three years), Dr Rawcliffe says, it could be so significant that it makes the alliance set up in 2007 redundant.

"In a way we might have done ourselves out of a job, which would be fine: we would retire gracefully."

But he also warned that the channel will only be as good as its maintenance: if it is not taken care of, and if it gets clogged up with trees, weeds, brambles and silt, then it will be useless.

And he warns, looking up at the clear July sky, we never know when we might need it.