The weather and the water continue to dominate proceedings.

We are very much in the calm before the storm. There has been flooding in some areas since the torrential rain on Friday, compounded by blocked drains in some areas, but The Big One will be when the Thames bursts its banks either tomorrow or on Wednesday.

And it's not if, it's when. The Environment Agency tells us we can only sit, wait, and get our valuables to higher ground as the water that's just hit Oxford makes its way down the Thames into Berkshire.

In the newsroom it's like a trench as the troops count down the hours before they go over the top. A few members of staff have already been flooded and are off work as they try to cope - one or two more are back in work despite having houses under a couple of feet of water. One newsreader is performing admirably to read out flood warnings every half an hour without referring to the fact that her house, and her partner's, are both under water.

This morning we had three or four reporters out in various parts of the county that have been worst hit. When they returned to base it was almost as though our scouts had come back to the war room to pass on valuable information on the enemy's movements. The news bulletins begin, 'It's not over yet'. The Environment Agency spokespeople make hourly appearance.

It's an electric, uncomfortable atmosphere, alive with both the sense that a big news story is hoving into view - we are, after all, journalists - and the very real fear for many people that their houses and cars are on borrowed time. This afternoon I have had one colleague leaning on my shoulder, trying not to cry, softly despairing as the Environment Agency confirmed her house was in a Flood Warning zone. "I can't take this ... I've just got too much to do. I don't have a spare second this week, my house can't flood."

Another colleague, who only works here at weekends and lives a stone's throw from the Thames in Caversham, has been texting me from her weekday workplace. "Do you know which bits of Caversham have been evacuated? Is it where I live?" The apprehension is palpable. It turns out it's a false alarm - Caversham's residents are going nowhere, yet - but I've already offered to help her bail her house out when the time comes. It's all but inevitable.

You even start to wonder whether we're all that safe on top of our hill in Caversham Park. We'll never flood, but what about water supplies? There are over 300,000 people in Gloucester with nothing to drink and that's terrifying. Little things, like how would you flush the toilet? How do you feed a baby without water or power to warm a bottle? It feels like our colleagues further to the West - further along the front line - have already gone over the top, and we're the next in line.

And what did Blackadder do when next in line? He made a beeline for the general's war room by any spurious means he could, so that's exactly what I've done. I am Chief Mapper in the war room, having drawn up an interactive flood map for the radio station's website.

The idea came to me on Sunday night at home - we had more than 80 photos on the website but no good way to browse them, other than plod through one by one. So over the space of four hours I transferred the whole lot into a customised Google Map: working out where the photos were taken (most people who sent them in were very specific), producing a small thumbnail image linking to a bigger version, adding little blue markers in the correct places which open a photo when you click.

Then, this morning, it occurred to me the map had so much more potential. So I highlighted the stretches of Berkshire rivers under Flood Warnings using a thick yellow line, and gave ones with the All Clear a green line (when the worst hits, it'll go red). Now there are red markers alongside the blue ones - these allow you to listen to reports from BBC correspondents who've been in the various affected areas today. Green markers let you play Youtube videos of flooding in the Berkshire road where the marker sits.

I'm quite proud of it, and it's had a bit of attention in the newsroom which is great - I just hope it proves useful to people outside the newsroom in the big, wide, worried world. Keeping it updated is a round-the-clock job so I'm sleeping with my mobile by my side, and it needs constant maintenance - one of our reporters has just emailed me to state his "devastation" that his audio report won't play properly. But it's a thousand times easier to access our coverage with the map, so with a bit of luck, it'll be worth it.

And with a bit of luck, there won't be too much to add in the coming days. Ready, men?