When the waters of the Don began pouring into Kemnay on the night of January 7, it sparked a crescendo of noise from the banging of doors and the blasts of car horns.

Resources across Aberdeenshire were stretched as the mighty river spilled into the streets of communities up and down its length, with some 130 homes and 16 businesses in Inverurie, Port Elphinstone and Kintore hit.

But, both then and now, the stricken residents of the 47 flooded households in Kemnay admit to feeling ignored during the floods which ushered in 2016.

The deluge in the Donside village was not only caused by the rising waters of the Don, but in the Stuart Crescent, Fyfe Park and Victoria Terrace areas by water overflowing from drains and sewers which couldn’t cope.

And now, in the Kembhill Park area of Kemnay – where homes were filled with roughly a foot of water from the neighbouring river – residents are calling for immediate remedial action.

In this place, the ruin of almost 20 homes has been blamed on a gap to a flood barrier which runs along the riverside near their homes, but stops at the foot of a pumping station.

Residents say it was within this gap in the bund that the water which flooded their homes spilled through.

Now they are hoping Aberdeenshire Council will consider extending the flood defence fully.

“It has just been a nightmare, a bad, bad experience,” said Alexander King, who has lived in the Kembhill Park area for almost 40 years.

“My wife and I were in our beds. I opened the curtains, looked out the window and it was just a sea of water outside.”

Before she was carried to safety, Mr King’s wife, Muriel, managed to rescue cherished photographs of their grandchild as 9in of water made its way inside.

“Yes it could have been prevented,” Mr King added. “If the bund had carried on like it should have been, it [the flooding] would have been stopped”.

On the morning of January 8, it came down to a busload of helpers from Premier Coaches to clear up the blocked drains in the area.

John MacNicol, 65, hopes to be back in his flooded Kembhill Park home in the next few months.

He said: “After the event, we found out that, more or less, the emergency services were overstretched and couldn’t come and help us.

“In the end, it was a transport company that provided pumps to pump us out. We were sort of left on our own as a tail end of the system.

“We hadn’t been predicted to flood by the council, so therefore, there was no plan for us.”

Ken Ledingham, chairman of the Kembhill Park Flood Prevention and Resilience Group, said: “What we would like the council to do, and I know they have got a whole lot of demands in the rest of the Aberdeenshire area, we would certainly like a barrier which continued from where this one leaves off to go around the side of the pumping station.

“We don’t think that by joining up this barrier, it would actually have any great knock-on effect for other folks further down the river.”

The home of Estelle and Alan Davies in the area is still in the process of being dried out.

Mr Davies said: “My wife is convinced it is going to happen again, but I’m not because I have seen what has happened and it could be remedied.”

Stephen Archer, the council’s head of infrastructure services, said all issues were being logged and explored by the council as part of its flood recovery process.

He said: “It is looking at the river, the flow, the water levels and actually taking a slightly bigger view. It takes a bit of time which I can accept is a bit frustrating.”