In the evening of the 21st of May 2021, the Rheidol peaked at 2.243 m, just a few centimetres short of the October 2020 peak at the Llanbadarn Fawr gauging station. Although there was no danger to any properties, a few footpaths were cut off around the Rheidol in Aberystwyth.
The first photo is a picture of the Llanbadarn Fawr gauging station, at which the peak measurement of 2.243 m was recorded. You can see how close the water looks to spilling out of the banks, and just south of the gauging station the river was indeed completely over its banks.
The flooding was caused by persistent rainfall from a cyclone that hit the day before and lingered over the UK to fill the rivers beyond capacity. I suspect that some of the dams upstream of Aberystwyth in the Rheidol valley began to overflow around midday, when the river level graph from Llanbadarn Fawr begins to show a steep increase from a regular flow to the 2.243 m recorded that night.
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