By Community Correspondant Peter Lidbetter

With the recent snowfall and heavy rain, the tides past Teddington Lock have been higher than usual. This had disastrous results on Monday for fourteen people who found themselves cut off, and had to be rescued by the Teddington Life Boat Crew.

Teddington Life Boat station was made fully operational in 2002 after a collision between a cruiser and a dredger in 1989 triggered an initiative to build a series of RNLI lifeboat stations between Teddington and the Thames Estuary, of which Teddington is the furthest upstream.

A Latvian pair rescued from a cut-off piece of land between Richmond Bridge and Twickenham Bridge in Richmond was the first call that the crew received. They were rescued at approximately 4:15 in the afternoon after they had been stranded on a vanishing piece of land having been cut off from the bank by unusually high tides. The Thames towpath follows this section of the river and is often submerged at high tide, but on Monday, the tide rose enough to isolate a higher piece of land on which the pair was unlucky enough to be caught.

The crew of three volunteers were then called back upstream to a group of people trapped on Eel Pie Island, between Richmond and Teddington, which is connected to Twickenham Embankment by a low bridge. Unfortunately for the twelve people on it, with the rain-fuelled tide at a rare height, the bridge had become submerged and the island cut off. The crew rescued all twelve occupants of the island and delivered them to safety.

Teddington lifeboat station is made up entirely of volunteers, many of whom have no professional sea-faring experience. It has a total of 15 members, who are simultaneously called in the event of an emergency. It covers the length of the Thames from the point at which it becomes tidal (Teddington Lock) to Molesey, after which it becomes the responsibility of the Chiswick Pier lifeboat station.

Although an emergency is rare, a spokesman from the Teddington station said, “The public must be aware of what the river is doing, otherwise it’s easy to become trapped.”