The floods are a stark reminder – natural disasters can happen in the UK, too | Rose George

In Britain we've become so divorced from nature that its power now shocks us. Our assumptions about safety can be punctured by a few days of rain

I went running yesterday, up over the moors of West Yorkshire. We started at Guiseley - a dry town, in the new sense of the phrase - and ran through woods down to Esholt. Then, suddenly, it was a different place, where water was in control. A family had just finished shifting their belongings into the street. They said, "You should have come by 10 minutes earlier and you could have helped." And we would have, but we offered sympathies, as if they had had a death in the family, and ran on. A hundred metres down the lane, a caravan park was a lake, with caravans shoved up against fences. I turned my head left to the ferocious river, and there was a caravan wrapped around a tree, in a weird and shocking embrace, as mangled as if it had been in a huge crash. But there's no "as if" required: it was mangled by a huge crash, only the crash was the power of water and nature.

Related: Widespread flood warnings as UK braces for Storm Frank

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