Water cascades down a staircase at Dundrum shopping centre in south-east Dublin. Image taken from a video posted on Youtube by Showars.
Dublin's officials began the onerous task of piecing the capital back together again on Tuesday after a torrential downpour the day before swelled the city's main waterways, causing them to burst their banks. Water spilled over into the streets, and the flooding quickly prompted Dublin's City Council to enact its "
major emergency plan", which saw it send out Council staff and the Dublin Fire Brigade to help assist in the disaster.
According to Ireland's national meteorological service, Met Eireann, the Dublin region saw
82.2mm of rainfall Monday, the equivalent of one month's worth and by far the most since records first began there in 1954.
As rain continues to dump down on Dublin on Tuesday, the city has begun to take stock of the damage. Thus far, the flooding has wreaked havoc on transportation to and from the capital, with significant delays on several of Dublin's main routes and its
DART commuter train service. Homes, main arteries and even one of the city's largest commercial complexes, Dundrum shopping centre, have been inundated with water.
Most tragically though, the flooding is thought to have
caused the deaths of two people. A body was discovered south of Dublin in County Wicklow on Tuesday, near to where an off-duty police officer was reportedly helping to direct traffic before he went missing Monday night. Fire fighters have also found the body of a woman after pumping water out of the basement of a flooded building.
Weather forecasts announce showers along the coast in Dublin Tuesday night. Occasional showers are predicted for Wednesday.
Emmet O' Toole lives in Bray, a town that borders Dublin to the south. As a student at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), he commutes regularly to the capital's centre to attend classes.
It had been raining all day when a friend called to ask me to pick him up from the train station. Once I picked him up, we went to Dundrum [one of Dublin's major shopping centres] and walked around a bit looking at all the shops. At around eight in the evening we were sitting down at a restaurant when people started running out. They told us that the restaurant was going to have to be evacuated. There were sirens wailing and as we followed people out of the building we could see that it was flooded everywhere.
There was water seven feet high pushing through the double doors at the entrance to the shopping centre. We saw these two girls standing in the lift and one of them had an umbrella open. It took us a moment before we saw the water trickling down - it was coming down the lift as well.
At the car park in Dundrum there was only one drain, so you could see that it was clearly unprepared for that kind of rain.
There are a lot of jokes going around about the floods [a Youtube video posted by
MEDZMUZIC claiming to show footage of flooding at the Dundrum shopping centre in fact shows a scene of the Titanic sinking from James Cameron's 1997 film], but they've also caused a lot of anger around here. A friend called me today and told me not to even bother going to college because he went to the bus stop and waited over an hour before finally returning home. Driving around, the water came up to the bumper of your car. There was also a tree that fell onto some train tracks and caused major delays, so people are pretty frustrated by the transportation situation here."
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