THE daughter of an 87-year-old woman rescued from her home after being stranded for four days says she feared the latest bout of flooding could have “finished her off.”

Defiant Diana Mallows had been living upstairs without heating or hot food after floodwater poured into her detached home at North Curry, near Curry Moor, cutting off power.

She was finally rescued by firefighters on Saturday morning who carried her blanketed down a ladder and into a rubber dinghy.

Her daughter Lucy said: “I really think this time she will never be able to move back. It has gone too far and is too badly damaged. It will take months before the water even leaves the house.

“I feared this flood could finish her off. She said last week ‘I have turned against this house now – I can’t take it any longer’.

“She is getting more frail and now she is very nervous about slipping over and breaking another bone. She has hypertension and severe back problems.”

Diana, a Royal Navy veteran, was reluctant to leave the property, which was submerged in three feet of water and had only just renovated following devastating floods in May.

She blamed the Environment Agency for holding water on the Somerset Levels.

“Are the authorities waiting for me to die so they can turn Curry Moor into a lake and wildlife centre?” said Diana.

A spokesman for the EA said: “We are acutely aware of the problems flooding has caused people and the situation they find themselves in. There’s been a lot of ground running water because land is wet and saturated from the floods earlier this year.

“We have automatic pumps to pump away water into the rivers but when those levels are high we need somewhere to store it – that’s what the Somerset Levels were designed to do.

“They are part of the flood storage design system.”