As sea defences were washed away by huge waves, the Thames and Medway estuaries were inundated with more water than they could handle and along the North East Kent coast wave action ruined beaches and sand dunes.

The death toll across eastern England was 307 - but miraculously only one person from Kent perished.

Lethal combination
But how could such devastation take place? And what were the causes behind such a tragedy? The weather was certainly to blame, but it’s not quite as simple as you may think.

There were four main factors that contributed to the Great Flood: abnormally high tides, a higher-than-normal sea level, strong winds and finally the shape of the North Sea around Kent.

The high tides were in fact the spring tides, which in places along the east coast were the highest tides since 1911.

Added to that is the factor of the infamous low pressure system, which in this scenario lies across the North East of Scotland. In contrast to the high pressure system, low pressure doesn't push down as much on the surface of the earth, which allows the sea level to rise by as much as 1cm.

This doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider the size of the North Sea, 1cm can add a considerable amount to the total volume of water. In fact it adds 5752m3 of water!

Hurricane force
Another feature of low pressure is wind. Winds travel anticlockwise around an area of low pressure, so that as the low pressure moves from the North East of Scotland to Denmark, the winds flow down the east coast of England.

This particular area of low pressure was very deep, meaning that the lines of equal pressure - the isobars - were tightly-packed, indicating that the east coast was to receive some very strong winds.

In fact, winds of up to 84mph were recorded, and that’s hurricane strength! So in other words, we have much more water than usual, being pushed southwards towards the southeast - and this brings us to our final factor: topography.

The shape of the North Sea around the Kent coast is very different from the shape further North and this has a significant impact on how much damage Kent suffered.

The sea surrounding Kent is actually much shallower and much narrower, so as the water travelled southwards, there was a huge build up of water in a very small area - resulting in severe flooding.

Repeat performance
So could this situation happen again? Certainly the weather pattern could very well repeat itself, although with so many factors being involved, it is fairly unlikely. Some say that this particular situation will occur once every thousand years.

So could we cope if it did happen again? Once more this is all down to matter of opinion. Indeed our flood defence system has improved since 1953, however coastal defences are imperfect and it really would be a wait-and-see situation.

Furthermore with the Southeast being increasingly populated and with more and more housing being built on natural flood plains - perhaps next time we won’t be so lucky.