There is something about AFC Wimbledon and a crisis. Just over 20 years ago, it was a crisis that saw their football club fade from existence. Then it was a shortfall of funding for a new stadium. Then it was a flood creating a sinkhole in the pitch.
But the other thing about AFC Wimbledon is its resilience. You can’t, it seems, keep them down.
A fundraising campaign to fix the pitch raised £120,000 before the club asked fans to close it; the damage and costs still unclear, they wanted to make sure it didn’t exceed uninsured costs, and any excess will be donated to charity. The club were having to turn volunteers away, such was the outpouring – pardon the pun – of support.
“It has been amazing,” says head of operations Peter Watts, “but I’d be surprised if it didn’t happen at AFC Wimbledon, because for a football club they do have that kind of attitude.
“Because they’re fan owned, there’s a sense of ‘something’s happened which isn’t good, but we’re going to deal with this head on’, like they did 20 years ago when their football club disappeared from them. And that attitude is still very evident.”
But this phoenix club is not just built on goodwill. They believe that despite the pitch turmoil, the stadium’s build stood up remarkably well to such a severe weather event.
Within three days, they were running conferences in the suites on the first floor – only accessible by stairs because the lifts were and remain out of action – even while they were still filling up skips with wet paper and cardboard downstairs.
“The actual building is amazingly resilient,” Watts adds.
“All of our electrics, all our power sockets, are a metre above floor level, all our power and all systems, data systems, come down from the first floor. So actually, our whole building was operational, even though there was two to four inches of water throughout our ground.”
There was still some unavoidable damage. A significant amount of stock in the club shop had to be thrown away and the museum suffered too. Some walls and skirting boards on the ground floor will still bear the marks of mould spores that will require professional inspection and removal, but at least the modern sewerage system in the stadium means that, unlike other nearby buildings, there was no contamination from waste water.
So when football returns on Saturday with the visit of Carlisle United, it will be home but not quite as Dons fans know it. Disabled fans have had to be relocated because of damage to the lift electronics, and the hospitality guests will have a reduced menu. But that feels like a lucky escape given where the stadium found itself less than three weeks ago.
The first warning signs came in the early hours of Monday 23 September, when Watts’ phone started buzzing with Environment Agency alerts warning of flooding. The alerts are freely available to anyone and the Plough Lane stadium is built on a floodplain so they were not immediately concerning – but this was more than a regular low-level notification.
“It was a bit more of a severe warning than we had before,” says Watts.
Underneath the pitch at Plough Lane, Wimbledon’s stormwater run-off facility – known as an attenuation tank – had hit its 1,000,000-litre capacity, but the rain kept on coming.
In the space of nine hours, more than three times the usual rain for the whole of September fell. The River Wandle doubled in height to over three metres, its highest level for 11 years, and in some places its highest level ever recorded.
“The tank was full,” Watts recalls.
“That then became quite pressurised, as full things do, because there was no water leaving it, and yet there was water entering it, because there was still water flowing into it from all of our drains and the roof.
“To put it bluntly, it burst.”
It was that catastrophic event that caused the crater to appear in Plough Lane’s pitch, which had otherwise held up well to the rain. The verdant surface was punctuated by an Eton mess of sand, soil and turf, gyrated by the pressure of more than a million litres of water with nowhere to go.
The next day’s game against Newcastle United was postponed and switched to St James’ Park a week later, and a mammoth clean-up operation began. Wimbledon fans were desperate to help, keen to get football “home” as soon as possible – but no one involved is trying to forget this in a hurry.
Lessons will be learned, as much as they can. When the stadium was built, it was subject to a whole host of environmental reports – and the Save Wimbledon Stadium Action group, who protested to save the greyhound stadium that previously stood on the site, has already called the flooding “inevitable”.
But the planning process for the new stadium included reports on flood protections, surface water run-off and levels of the River Wandle, as well as the input of the Environment Agency, but few could have predicted the nine-hour deluge.
“If you look at Hurricane Milton they’ve got in America, it is just off the scale, so all their planning is just totally gone out of the window. Everything they do about how they deal with hurricanes is null and void, because it’s just gone to a level they’ve never seen before,” says Watts, who also sits on the board of the British Association for Sustainable Sport.
“And sadly there just seems to be more frequent extreme level of weather occurring. I know there’s a lot of data on climate change and sustainability, and environmental impact and rising temperatures and what that might mean to the impact. But just anecdotally, I think we are hitting things.
“We’re already in the middle of reviewing, getting loads of information, and if we can make some changes, then we will. But at that moment in time, unfortunately, we had a set of circumstances which put a massive amount of pressure on our system.”
Pressure, the Dons fans might insist, is for tyres.
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