The emotion and exhaustion at mudslide-hit spa

“The emotion is really hard to explain. I’m so relieved but I’m exhausted."

Penny Weston has been sharing the bittersweet experience of reopening her family-run health spa five weeks after a mudslide forced its closure.

It had been business as usual at Moddershall Oaks until flash flooding in September caused mud from a recently-ploughed field to flow into the venue.

On Friday, the doors were opened once more, but the closure and repair work, Ms Weston said, had cost the business hundreds of thousands of pounds. And it meant staff had been left emotional and exhausted too - "but we have to keep going", she added, mindful of customers with bookings for special occasions.

It wasn't just mud that upended things on 22 September, water seeped in too, director Ms Weston told BBC Radio Stoke.

The flow caused damage to the spa’s restaurant and kitchen, as well as blockages in the drainage system.

Ms Weston said the team had pushed to get the venue up and running again, having been told originally it may have to stay closed until the new year.

“We just had to push on faster and call on different trades and different local businesses to really pull this off sooner because people have got so many special occasions booked with us,” Ms Weston said.

“Letting people down and having to reschedule bookings for the last five weeks has been hard enough and we just didn’t want to continue doing that."

Ms Weston said the team came together on Thursday evening to celebrate the end of the clean-up operation and the site’s reopening the next day.

“It was quite hard to hold back everybody’s emotions really because everybody has worked so hard to get to this point,” she added.

“I think everybody is a little bit worn out by the last five weeks and the relief seeing customers coming through the door [on Friday morning] has been an amazing feeling.”

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