Businesses urged to make plans for floods

Areas in the west and south of the Capital were particularly hit by the freak weather as a quarter of July's rainfall came down in the space of a few hours.

Early estimates made on the damage indicate costs could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, while the city council is currently preparing its own figures on the weekend's events.

Mystery of nude pair who braved floods to push car

Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce spokesman Graham Bell said flooding is something businesses need to plan ahead for.

He said: "The cost will run into hundreds of thousands of pounds but only the fullness of time will give us a total.

"Floods are a known problem and need to be part of any risk management plan for businesses."

Fraser Ralston, a forecaster with the Met Office, said that the level of rain Edinburgh experienced over the weekend was not unusual for the summer and said the Capital will "definitely" flood again, although there is no way of predicting when.

Mr Ralston said: "It's not unusual to get this sort of heavy downpour in the summer, but a lot of the time it occurs in the countryside where no-one but the farmer notices.

"It's only when the rain is over a heavily built-up area that there are problems.

"The issues are worse in urban areas that are hilly, like Edinburgh, so it is quite prone to flooding.

"It's not that unusual, it will definitely happen again, but whether it's in one month or three years' time, we do not know."

Meanwhile, it has emerged a man had a lucky escape after a large chunk of masonry fell from a building onto the pavement outside Scotmid on Easter Road.

Police cordoned off the area outside the shop following the masonry fall at 9.45pm on Friday, while the building was made secure. No-one was injured by the stone, which is understood to have been a 2.5ft by 1ft ornamental feature of the building.

The store manager of the Scotmid reported the fallen masonry to the police after a man walking past saw it landing on the street.

A spokesman for Scotmid said: "Obviously it must have come as a shock to the person and that's a concern to us that this has happened and we apologise for giving him a fright.

"It's one of these unknown things that you can't account for, no matter how much checking we do of a building,

"The most important thing now, quite simply, is to make it safe which we are doing immediately."

In Barnton Grove, residents were hit with sewage as well as flooding. Lewis Sharpe, 76, said the garages beneath his block of flats were affected.

Mr Sharpe, a retired engineer, said: "We get flooded all the time but as well as the floods, this time we have sewage."We are having to get the factors to come and clean it out."

The predicted rainfall for Friday was around 5-10mm, however, 26mm of rain was recorded at Threipmuir Reservoir and 36mm at Bonaly Reservoir in a two hour period in the early afternoon. Water levels at Murrayburn rose from 8mm to 1.26m between 12pm and 2pm.

A council spokeswoman said: "Following very heavy rain over the weekend, certain areas of the city experienced flash flooding.

"We had emergency council staff working around the clock to provide assistance, in what was a temporary bout of severe weather."