Construction companies are busy at working doing whatever they can and long reach excavators are much in demand.
The armed forces from all three services are continuing to provide flood relief in affected parts of the UK, including the southwest and the Thames Valley.
More than 2,000 servicemen and women have been deployed, with thousands more on standby.
Picture above shows Royal Marines laying sandbags in Northmoor, Oxfordshire [Picture: Leading Airman (Photographer) Rhys O'Leary, Crown copyright]
Power companies have already reconnected more than 414,000 customers who lost power in the past two days.
Plant firm Aggreko is deploying additional power generators to flooded areas especially care homes and hospitals. So far, Aggreko has mobilised and dispatched 53 generators with a combined capacity of 8.5 MVA. In the longer term, Aggreko is readying dehumidification and heating equipment to restore public and private buildings.
Other companies are organising volunteering from within their workforces, for example Thales and Airbus, and Task Hub have launched floodvolunteers.co.uk.
Network Rail has been facing battles on many fronts, with fallen trees, flooding and landslips. Tracks out of Paddington heading west remain heavily affected.
In Devon, shipping containers have been welded together to construct a temporary sea wall where the track bed was washed away (pictured below).
Contractor Geoffrey Osborne has been working to get the railway in Hampshire back open again after landslips in Botley where an 80-metre section of embankment has collapsed. In some places, the track has dropped by as much as two metres. Osborne has had personnel on site 24 hours a day to get the line back in action.
The repair works involve building temporary access to the site, made more complex by navigating several thousand tonnes of material across flooded fields. The work is made up of tracks and cables being removed and installing lines of sheet piles to the full length. Only then can the embankment be rebuilt in between them for the line to be reinstated on top.
In the southeast there have also been several major landslips on the Tunbridge Wells-Hastings line (below), which may need to be shut for several weeks for repairs.
Prime Minister David Cameron said: “Dealing with these floods will be a long haul, and it will require a stepped-up national effort with the whole country pulling together. The government is taking action across the board to deal with the clear-up, and we have been working with businesses to see what they can do to help those people affected. I welcome the support that they are offering and the role they are playing in helping to get parts of the country get back on their feet.”
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has warned that the UK economy will take a hit from the flooding, but gross domestic product should bounce back as repair work takes off.
Berenberg chief UK economist Rob Wood was quoted by the Reuters news agency, however, saying that construction industry output could be suppressed by the floods.
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