A WORCESTER wedding party endured flash floods, 150mph winds, no food, water or sanitary facilities, encounters with looters and hours sheltering in squalid conditions when hurricane Wilma ripped through Cancun, Mexico.

Traumatised, exhausted but safe, all 11 finally arrived home this week - although Daniel Gillett and his fiancee Sarah Jameson remain single after their dream wedding in the tropics was cancelled.

Daniel, aged 27, has said it was the most horrific few days imaginable. He said: "We had been planning our dream wedding for about a year-and-a-half and we are just devastated.

"We realised the day before the hurricane hit that we weren't going to get married and I took it more badly than Sarah.

"I broke down for a while but then we just had to concentrate on getting through the storm."

The couple still want to get married abroad and are now trying to see if they can salvage any of the money they had forked out for wedding arrangements.

"Hopefully, we can get something back, but we are not yet sure whether Sarah's wedding dress has been permanently damaged by floodwater."

His father, ex-firefighter Colin, 53, agreed.

"It was the most dreadful experience. We were shunted from pillar to post and just had to do what we could to survive. I just wanted to keep my family safe.

"We had to bale out of the school classroom where we were staying. Water was just pouring through the door and shutters. Everything was getting soaked until we made a makeshift boom.

"After sheltering in the school with 150 other people, we had to endure the most frightening 12-hour journey of our lives on a coach travelling through deep flood water. There were overturned and abandoned vehicles everywhere."

Two of the children on the trip, both under two, were also taken ill and were treated for skin irritation in a waterlogged hospital.

"Sometimes we were frightened when we heard shooting - we even bumped into looters. But the locals were fantastic and so kind. We left them what money and blankets we had when we left," said Mr Gillett, of Meadow Road, Claines. The group was eventually flown to the Dominican Republic where they rested before flying to Manchester and then catching a coach to Birmingham.