Flooding is horrendous. It is not just gently rising and seemingly benign calm waters, but raging torrents of destruction; and when it all goes, what is left behind is an apocalyptic chaos coated in an effluent contaminated slime.
In this long month of December, so many people have learned first hand what it means to be a victim of the force of nature. Some will live in houses that insurance companies were willing to financially protect, yet many, many others will not. Over the last decade and a half insurance providers have been allowed to deny flood cover as they see commercially fit. I’ll leave you to decide the politics, morality and, indeed, humanity of this.
Recently I’ve become very well acquainted with Hebden Bridge – that most friendly and quirky of places with a genuine stamp of individuality nestled in the beauty of the Yorkshire Moors – moorland that sheds its rainwater quickly via steep hillsides into the upper reaches of the Rivers Calder and Hebden before these normally gentle rivers converge in the middle of the town. An old town. Not a young flood plain development sanctioned by careless councilors and corrupt planners. That convergence has demonstrated it’s latent power too many times this century already. First in 2000, then twice in 2012 and now December 2015. Historical statistics relied on by Building Regulations and insurers are being made to look irrelevant. And so the discussions regarding the management of watershed land, the positioning and height of defences and the regularity of water course dredging will become yet again more potent and emotional, with climate change lurking behind with much nodding and little doing.
If you haven’t yet followed the discussion on planting trees to mitigate the speed of run-off water from the land into the rivers, then I urge you to do some ‘googling’. There is no controversy, only a reluctance by certain land owners and a lack of funding. Once the facts are known, signing this petition becomes an obvious course of action.
After Christmas Day’s rain and the eerie flood warning sirens, Hebden’s sense of community quickly formed a disaster management team that efficiently matched the desperate needs of those affected with the services of those willing and able to help. To walk into the Town Hall building was to immediately sense a clear purpose and a collective spirit. And that it is where I became involved in a small way.
Initially, I helped clear the mud. Hard, honest work. And then I was asked to look at a damaged property. A house that was maybe in excess of 150 years old. Imagine water cascading down the hillside opposite your front window, pouring across the road to the river behind your house and filling your cellar en route. The cellar dividing walls cannot take the differential pressure and fail causing the ground floor to collapse – severing the gas supply pipe and depositing the living room contents into the cold waters beneath. Meanwhile, the river on the other side continues to rise until it is 1m above the ground floor level. You are a tenant, but it is still your home. You could not get building contents flood insurance. You did not have time to get your possessions out. Your private landlord has not got building structure flood insurance. He has no contingency plan. He didn’t think it would flood again so soon after the last 3 times. Your home is a back to back terrace and your similarly affected neighbours are tenants to other landlords. Landlords who do not have a management plan. Building companies want to do insurance work first with guaranteed payment, not haggle for the price and fight to be paid. Across the north, there is presently a lot of insurance covered work. A veritable nightmare. I cannot express what I feel for the tenant.
I was then asked to review an end terrace house that had been hit by a van carried along by the flood water. A sacrificial lamp post had taken the brunt of the force and the garden wall the rest. It was a pleasure to confirm that the house wall was fine. The owners had that amazing smiling stoicism that I’ve now seen so many times. Very humbling. We then looked at the internal structure and finishes that had been immersed in the flood water and the best plan for drying out the house and assessing what needed to be replaced. The couple were pragmatic people and we soon arrived at a plan that hopefully will limit the costs – again they had been refused flood insurance.
Drying out the fabric of the building is the number one priority and causes the greatest delays to re-habitation (presuming you have the luxury of living elsewhere). How to go about that was what I was going to cover in this blog posting, but given the amount I’ve written so far, for accessibility I will do that in another one soon to follow.
If you are a victim of the flooding – and have the power and network coverage to allow you to be reading this – I just want to tell you how much I feel for your suffering and wish you the best of luck in getting your house back to be your home in as soon a time as possible.
Site Foreman
