The wait goes on. I'm at home now but expecting to be called back into work at any point during the night. It all depends how bad the flooding is.

Yesterday I wrote to compare the atmosphere in our newsroom to a form of embattled trench in a warzone, hours away from the final battle. In response, Dan Grey wrote the following comment:

I think you guys need to calm down a bit. Listen to what the EA are telling you: that the Thames on a Flood Warning, NOT a Severe Flood warning (i.e. widespread flooding of property is NOT expected), and that the flood is only going to be at or below 2003 (which saw only very limited flooding in Caversham), and nowhere near 1947 (that was The Big One, when as far up as Gosbrook Road flooded to some depth).

I couldn't agree more about the calming down, but it's difficult. One half of you is driven by a sort of journalistic fervour for there to be a story, the other half keeps that in check and stops things getting carried away. On top of that some people had quite real concerns that their houses would flood (and indeed some already have, as I said). So calming down wasn't easy.

I don't agree about the Environment Agency advice though. Dan goes on to say:

At most, some farmland and the very lowest-lying areas are going to flood. Flood Warning only means that there's a *possibility* of some flooding, not that it will happen (yes, the EA warning system is poor). Severe Flood Warning is the one to listen for - when you hear that, that means flooding of property *is* going to happen.

The EA has been saying this throughout - check the archived information bulletins on the News section of their site.

Well, no, Dan, they haven't been saying that throughout. I've been in work for ten or eleven hours a day these past four days, and I've heard at least 20 Environment Agency spokespeople on our radio station in that time. The advice has been constantly changing. I promise you that 36 hours ago, the EA were predicting floods akin to 1947, both on air and on the phone to us off air.

Since then they've been all over the place, from predicting a surge of water down the Thames (causing the Evening Standard to demand residents of London near the Thames "flee") to the most recent advice, which is that the flood will be more like the floods of 2003, if not the lesser floods of 2000.

I don't blame the EA at all for the ever-changing nature of their advice. I imagine predicting exactly how a river will flood, taking into account all its tributaries, the surrounding geography and the weather pattern, is an incredibly inexact science. As one of our presenters said this morning, it's a wonder they can predict anything at all.

But it makes preparing for the flood something of a dark art. It's looking fairly certain now that Berkshire will fare much better than Oxford, let alone the likes of Gloucester - but earlier in the week the EA advice could easily have been interpreted to suggest vast swathes of Caversham would be under four or five feet. We had friends and colleagues sweating over the EA's flood map, showing a blue zone in which housing would be affected by severe flood, even though their houses were very much on the border of that zone.

If the news bulletins on the EA's website do show a consistent line of advice, then they're at odds with the interviews we conducted with EA spokespeople on air. It's not their fault, but is it any wonder it's difficult to keep calm when none of us know if we'll be in work overnight? We've already had one TV reporter spend 28 hours in Pangbourne on Environment Agency advice in anticipation of flooding which has yet to arrive - it creates a lot of uncertainty, because we need to be there when it happens, and so we have to have everybody on pins to jump the moment it kicks off.

All that said, it is very easy to get carried away when you see what's going on in places like Cheltenham and Gloucester - see Amy J's comment on my last post for an idea of what it's like there. And thanks for the compliment about the map, Dan. I've had quite a lot of good feedback about it today, and a lot of people similarly want it to be extended to cover places like Oxford. Sadly that's not possible this time around (it'd take forever to coordinate it with the information they have, and our map can only accommodate 100 markers at a time before things go a bit awry), but I'll be pushing for us to do something like that if this happens again in future.