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We are pretty used to covering floods, by and large. There are always one or two a year and there’s a pretty standard response in terms of newsgathering. Get there, get the pictures, hear the stories and see the clean-up.

Not this year. These are the worst floods any of us have seen in Britain and the challenge to report them has been huge.

We had a of course when , and had unprecedented amounts of water dumped on them in a few short hours.

News 24 had hours and hours of live coverage, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One had extended bulletins and a special programme devoted to the disaster that had devastated thousands of homes.

Now we’re at it again but with different place names popping up on screen - Tewkesbury, Gloucester, Abingdon.

The principal difficulty with these kinds of stories is knowing precisely where the problems are going to be.

We knew there would be a huge amount of rain and the forecasters were very accurate about the general area it would fall. But no-one had predicted the M5 would be under water, that water treatment works would become submerged or that electricity supplies would be threatened.

The old reporter’s cliché about the first light of dawn revealing the full extent of the disaster was apt as always.

Like other broadcasters, we generally have fewer resources to deploy at weekends because generally we don’t need them. But this weekend we had some contingency plans which swiftly came into action.

Getting the first pictures is always a race and as usual viewers sent in hundreds of images and moving picture captured on their mobile phones while our own camera crews struggled to get to the various locations.

Even so, we didn’t have a real idea of the scale until our helicopter arrived and started beaming pictures of a flooded landscape back into Television Centre.

We put our West of England correspondent Jon Kay on board at one point and he vividly described the scene below him, the sense of shock at the awesome power of nature clearly discernable in his voice.

It’s true television news seems almost to have been invented for covering extreme weather. The pictures are often dramatic and keep even the most disinterested glued to the screen - my youngest daughter for one.

But in our enthusiasm to cover the story and tell our audiences what has happened to these communities, we should never forget the great deal of human suffering - and sometimes tragedy - which accompanies them.

That’s the real challenge - to go beyond splashing about in waders and finding how people’s lives have been affected by the worst floods in a generation.