Storm turns Edinburgh streets to rivers

A 3-hour drenching turned streets in Scotland's capital into turbulent rivers Saturday afternoon and sent water into first-floor flats. Meteorologists said the storm dumped several inches of rain on Edinburgh in a short period, The Scotsman reported. But residents commenting on the newspaper's Web site blamed the local council for failure to maintain street drainage in the old city. Shaun Robertson and Lee Craig, painters and decorators, said rising water trapped them in their van for more than an hour in one of the hardest hit neighborhoods. "We were driving through as we'd just done a job on Balcarres Street when the water started rising pretty quickly and we were stranded in our van," Robertson said. "The electrics went off and we were left stuck. In the space of around 10 minutes the water had gone from a few inches to being up around the doors, I've never seen anything like it in my life." A Balcarres Street resident said she and her family spent the rest of the day bailing out the ground floor of their house.