Gloucestershire - (Rotters): The Navy has sent two nuclear-powered submarines to the flood-stricken counties bordering Gloucestershire after all other efforts to find survivors failed.
MHS Panic-Stricken and HMS Noah were despatched from Portsmouth and made their way up the Avon and Severn rivers before reportedly becoming lost in a former wheat field now under two hundred fathoms of water.
The Navy said today that the sub captains were doing everything possible to locate missing local residents but had been hampered by the presence of what eventually turned out to be a Russian submarine on a possible espionage mission.
"How it got there is a mystery," an Admiralty spokesman said today.
"We are working on a theory that it may have come up the Bristol Channel during the cold war and stayed deliberately in our freshwater areas ever since rather than return back to Vladivostok.
"It's a bit of an old banger and needs towing back to port. But all that will have to wait until we locate and rescue Prince Charles's Gloucester Old Spots which have been sighted on an island in the middle of what used to be the M4."
There has been no comment as yet from Vladimir Putin.
