A GRIEVING pensioner fears he may have to use a canoe to reach his late wife’s grave due to constant flooding leaving the graveyard “underwater”.
Simeon Scott has blasted Egremont Town Council (ETC), just outside the Lake District in Cumbria, for allegedly fobbing off locals about the issue.
The 64-year-old lost his wife of eight years Tetiana last summer, aged 62, and visits Egremont Cemetery every morning.
Heavy rain in late August left some of the graves underwater, and with winter fast approaching, Simeon says the cemetery itself is just a constant bog.
He said at one point the council had drainage installed and later planted some bushes and trees in a bid to absorb some of the water, but both failed.
He says ETC is adamant it is monitoring the situation – with plans currently in place to extend the grounds, though Simeon fears it maybe years before anything is done.
Local tradesmen have told him the cemetery has flooded regularly for the last 30 years.
He told The Sun: “This happens when we get heavy downpours.
“Last year it was horrendous. And as you know, with global warming our winters are getting worse for rain.
“All you get out of the council is, ‘we’re monitoring it. We’re monitoring it’.
“What are they waiting to happen? What is it they want to happen?
“Are they waiting of the Second Coming or something or until we can’t get down there and we need a canoe to get to the graves, or what?
“What is it they’re waiting for to happen?”
Simeon says if he’d known “how wet it was down there” he would never have allowed his beloved wife to be buried there after she died last June.
Whenever there is heavy rain, one side of the cemetery “actually pools with water”, he explained.
“There’s a couple of graves there that are actually underwater.
“The topography of the land where the water pools is because there’s a bit of an indentation in the ground there. The opposite side to where my wife is buried.
He said on the side containing Tetiana’s grave there is no such indentation “but it gets the same amount of water, and rather than the water pooling, it makes the ground boggy”.
Simeon continued: “This has been going on for decades.”
He understands the council employed a local building firm to install some drainage “which has never worked”.
“They then got left some money from someone, and planted trees and bushes to try and absorb the water. It’s never worked.”
“From people that I’ve spoken to, employees that have gone in there, tradesmen, the stonemasons, and one thing and another that’s gone in there, they said the cemetery’s been like that for 30 years.”
Simeon added: “We’ve got a town council now that just doesn’t want to do anything about it.”
Town councillor Sam Pollen and local MP Josh MacAllister went down to the cemetery after the last major downpour that flooded the ground between August 22 and 23, claiming in a video the flooding had quickly dried up.
And that it does so within a couple of hours each time.
“That’s total and utter c***,” said Simeon. “I’ve got photographic evidence that shows that that water stays there for three or four days at a time.”
He said their video was also “misleading” because they were standing on the side of the cemetery that only gets boggy, while also blaming the iron mine workings for the problem.
“There isn’t any mine workings under there,” said Simeon.
“The bad drainage is because of the sub soils and it actually needs a drainage engineer to go in there and see what they can do to actually rectify the issue.
“But we’ve got a council that are just not interested.
“I’ve been on at the council now since the beginning of this year and and am just being palmed off with excuses.”
Now, Simeon doesn’t know what to expect as the colder months roll in.
“It’s at its worst in winter,” he said.
Simeon said, amid plans to extend the cemetery to allow for extra burial space, the council has said it will carry out various flood surveys as part of its assessment.
He said: “That tells me it could be five, 10 years down the line, or it tells me that if they decide they’re not going to go into that land, that the flooding won’t be addressed.”
The Sun has contacted the council, as well as Sam Pollen and Josh MacAllister for comment.
