LONDON, July 21: More than 2,000 people woke up on Saturday in make-shift shelters in southern and west central England after abandoning their cars on flooded highways or leaving trains disrupted by torrential rains.

Flooding provoked by exceptionally heavy rains on Friday forced dozens of people to climb to rooftops and wait to be rescued by helicopter, deprived hundreds of homes without electricity and caused flight cancellations.

Three Royal Air Force helicopters have rescued more than 40 people but still have to evacuate another dozen, including a man clinging to a lamppost in flood water and people stuck on roofs, emergency services said.

The RAF base at Kinloss, in Scotland, helped evacuate 60 people from Sedgeberrow in Worcestershire, in western England bordering Wales, who were stranded after the River Isbourne burst its banks.

Holidaymakers were also airlifted to safety from caravan parks near the river in Evesham, between Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, where many motorists were also stranded.

Some were forced to remain in their vehicles overnight and others chose to abandon their cars.

In Gloucestershire, around 2,000 people spent Friday night in emergency shelters after being forced from their cars or homes due to the flooding.

Police said that people were now starting to leave the centres run by the county council as the waters receded.

Passengers were on Friday night asked to leave trains at Oxford and Banbury, with many of them forced to sleep at a school in north Oxford. Trains were unable to stop at Didcot station because of flooding.

“We've ordered 150 sleeping bags from the army and some of my staff have gone down to the local Tesco to get things like towels, toothpaste and soap,” said John Kelly, Oxfordshire's county emergency planner.

“This is not the first choice of school, because the one we were going to had actually been flooded itself,” he said.

At Bampton in the west of Oxfordshire, a county just west of London, more than 300 homes flooded and 1,200 left without power.

Police said Friday night they were preparing for up to 100 residents to spend the night at nearby council offices.

Some 141 domestic and international flights leaving from and arriving to London's Heathrow Airport were cancelled because of the rains on Friday, and passengers were being re-issued tickets on Saturday, an airport spokesman said.

The spokesman said flights were running normally on Saturday.

Some of the country's television stations briefly went off the air as satellite signals were disrupted, while computers jammed in offices.

Stewart Wortley, a meterologist at the Met Office, countered suggestions in front-page headlines that the storms hitting Britain resembled monsoons in India.

“Whilst they are unusual to be widespread like this, they're not totally unusual. They have happened before. We wouldn't agree with those comments,” Wortley said.

He said 142.6 millimetres of rain fell in Pershore, Worcestershire on Friday, far short of the 279 millimetres that fell in Martinstown, Dorset on July 18, 1955 — the daily record in England.—AFP