The year the lake spilled over… #travel #books

In Problems at the Lakeside Hotel, one of the main challenges hotel owners Rico and Stacy have to face is a rising – then overflowing – Lake Constance. Having to issue guests with wellies to get to the restaurant for dinner each night must be in the top ten of every hotel manager’s worst nightmares… And a flood is something that really did happen. I’m not a hotel keeper, but I lived here by our lovely lake in the summer of ’99 when – you’ve guessed it – the lake overflowed.

A combination of events was to blame. First of all, the winter before had been unusually snowy. Not such a problem ‘down’ here at around 400m above sea level, but up in the mountains, there was a whole lot of white stuff waiting to melt and come down to swell the lake. Then, we had a horrendously wet and chilly spring, which meant that by May, the lake was nicely full. And there was still a whole lot of white stuff waiting to melt up in the mountains.

The temperature rose… The snow melt began, water pouring down the mountainsides, tumbling along rivers and streams, causing havoc in little villages as it passed through. Down and down it came, to end up in Lake Constance – where there was no room at all for more water.
The first inkling I had of what was going to happen was when I was walking by a full-to-the-brim lake with my children, and a truck full of soldiers arrived. They started to pile sandbags along the lake banks, which turned out to be a complete waste of time because the water level in the end extended about fifty metres south of their sandbag wall.

There really isn’t anything you can do to stop a lake that size overflowing; you can only watch. A day or two later, the entire harbour area was flooded. (These next pics are photos of photos, excuse the poor quality.)

The water was never high, you could get about in most places in your wellies, but woe betide you if you needed new wellies; there wasn’t a pair to be had in town. Cellars were flooded and so were streets, the railway line was under water and so was the underpass, board walks (see middle pic) were everywhere and there was no escaping the drone of pumps.

The same thing was happening all around the lake, and some places were much worse off than we were. Click HERE to see some great pics of daily life in summer ’99. And HERE for some more.
It was another messy six weeks before the lake was back in the lake, so to speak. And the big clear up began.

As soon as I started writing the Lakeside series back in 2017, I think, I knew I had to use our flood in one of them. There are lots of hotels and houses along the lake bank, and most of them faced the same situation Rico and Stacy did in my book. So if you want to know more about the watery challenges hotel owners had here in 1999, have a read of Problems at the Lakeside Hotel…