LONDON - More than 50 people were airlifted to safety Wednesday after landslides caused by violent rain trapped cars on a road in Scotland, just days after flash floods devastated a tourist village in southwest England. A Royal Air Force (RAF) helicopter rescued 57 people, including a significant number of children and babies, after a sea of mud and debris from two landslides engulfed around 20 cars on the main A85 road, an RAF spokesman said.

Those trapped were hemmed in on the road by the landslides, meaning they could only be reached by helicopter. Rescuers had to work swiftly for fear that further landslips could engulf the people, said Michael Mulford, a spokesman for the RAF base in Kinloss:

A landslide cut across them and one behind them. There was a real risk not from the two that happened but from the one that might follow. It was absolutely essential to get those people out of impending danger. People get cold, wet and frightened in those conditions and it was imperative to get them out before there was more landslides worse than the previous ones.

The unusually severe landslides came just two days after one of the worst flash floods seen in Britain for decades laid waste to Boscastle, a popular tourist village in Cornwall. No one was injured in the flooding, but dozens of cars were washed away and much of the village was severely damaged. Mulford said the road, at the western tip of Loch Earn, north of the city of Stirling and about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Edinburgh, was washed out by a band of extreme rain sweeping up Scotland.

This is certainly quite an unusual trend here to have landslides. We tend to get floods, but this is a new and slightly sinister development over the last one or two weeks. A massive has taken place a week earlier on a main route between Edinburgh and Inverness.
Michael Mulford, RAF Kinloss

A police official, who described 14 vehicles involved in the accident, said earlier that no one was believed injured. Residents in the hilly area, the picturesque gateway to the Scottish Highlands, described a washout by massive rains and said they were cut off from many routes.

Sandra Black, who runs a hotel in nearby Lochearnhead, told Sky News she saw a heavy deluge of water through the village. We are hemmed in by the water, she said. The landslides, and the floods in Cornwall, come amid roiling storms that have battered western Europe this week, also leaving nine dead in southern France. Both heir to the British throne Prince Charles and Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott have visited Boscastle, with Charles announcing Wednesday he was contributing money to help the seaside village recover from the storm.

Copyright 2004. AFP & WeatherOnline Ltd