An apple farmer and his Unimog braving the floods.
When storm Dennis raged across the English village Hampton Bishop in the district of Herefordshire last year causing the rivers to overflow, and cider producer Kier Rogers and his Unimog U 1700 came to the local residents’ aid.
Rural idyll under threat.
Hampton Bishop is located between two streams, Lugg and Wye, joining not far from the small town. When both rivers reached record levels with banks overflowed by more than 1 m, the authorities called out a state of emergency: With impassable streets, the residents were stranded.
Neighbourhood assistance of a different kind.
Kier Rogers is actually a horticulturist, specialising in reinterpreting conventional fruit cultivation methods in modern ways. In 2015, he founded his own Cider brand, Colcombe House, which caters to some of the most famous restaurants in the country. When the flood stroke in Hampton Bishop in the spring of 2020, Kier Rogers became the logistics hero of the calamity. For three days, he and his 28-year-old Unimog delivered urgently needed food items. More than that, he carried his neighbours between their houses and shops that they could not get to anymore.
Fields of application other than harvesting apples.
As a longtime Mercedes-Benz enthusiast, Kier Rogers purchased his first Unimog 15 months prior to the incident. The Unimog has many tasks on the 400 ha large terrain along the banks of the river Wye. One of them is transporting apples to the local winepress house.
