Helicopter and boat crews rescued hundreds trapped after storms whipped through Britain, flooding towns and villages, including William Shakespeare’s picturesque birthplace where waters gushed into a theatre.

Motorists slept overnight in cars on rain-lashed highways, while others were attempting to find vehicles abandoned on major roads on Friday after the downpours caused long delays. The Association of British Insurers estimated damage from the floods could run into the hundreds of millions of pounds. Meteorologists said many areas of Britain had more than a month’s worth of rain in a few hours on Friday and predicted more downpours.
“We have acted quickly in what is an emergency,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in a televised statement. “When you have a situation where a month’s rain is coming down and a month’s water is being created in an hour or two, then people have to act very quickly,” he said.

He said officials would review whether changes were needed to flood defences, but said the government had already increased spending on barriers.

“These are the sorts of rainfalls that we experienced in the past every 100 years, every 150 years, sometimes every 200 years — they’re very extreme,” Baroness Barbara Young, chief executive of Britain’s Environment Agency, told SkyNews.

Worst hit
Weather forecaster MeteoGroup UK, said that Pershore, a town around 200 kilometres northwest of London, was worst hit, drenched by 145.4 millimetres of rain in 25 hours, between Thursday and Friday. Usual levels are 50-60 millimetres in a month, the centre said.

Royal Air Force helicopters rescued more the 100 people from rooftops of flooded villages on Saturday, and around 2,000 people spent Friday night in emergency shelters in Gloucestershire, a county in southwest England.