Floods
There are very few stories that will always get covered by newsrooms and most of them involve harm, violence or weird sex but if you run into the editor’s office and shout “Floods!!!” you’ll always get a positive response.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called out over the years to cover floods and their effects. On the one hand, you’d be forgiven for thinking “it’s only a bit of water,” but the images of knee-deep water where once there was only Tarmac and wheelie bins live long in the memories of viewers and readers (not so much in the ears of listeners, however). And there is one, all-encompassing reason why floods sell features: it’s because we look at the damage flood water causes and we all, every one of us, collectively, think “Thank God that’s not our house.”
The four day news cycle of a flood goes like this:
Day 1: the weather forecast predicts heavy rain. People get worried.
Day 2: the flood hits.
Day 3: the water recedes.
Day 4: the realisation kicks in.
Day 5 to 365: the rebuild.
It’s a collective disaster - like a hurricane - and the wreckage a flood causes is devastating.
Over the years I’ve reported on dozens and dozens of floods. In Doncaster I watched Prince Charles, as he was then, sitting in an inflatable dinghy, being pulled along the high street by fire fighters in waders, as he came to see the extent of the flood damage. Nobody could work out why he didn’t just walk along the pavements in his wellies like everyone else - the water was only a foot deep - but the pictures of the Prince went around the world, it raised awareness of the town’s plight and charitable donations poured in.
I remember walking down a deserted street in York late at night, sloshing through the flood water, when, out of nowhere there was a huge bang. A manhole cover exploded out of the ground and took off like a missile. More than a hundred kilograms of cast iron careered out of the flood water, a fountain erupting from the drain, the metal spinning like a tossed coin before gravity took hold and the cover came clattering down to earth.
Another time in the same city I watched the army, racing against time, set up a sandbag factory to try and help communities protect themselves. I’ve seen councils spend a fortune hiring in every freelance gulley tanker in the area to clean the drains out in an effort to get the water flowing and I’ve watched homeowners stuff their car to the gunnels in an attempt to run away from it all. But the most disheartening thing about flooding is that no matter how hard you try you just can’t hold the water back.
In June 2007, the British economy, for once, really was going gangbusters. Sustained growth, a healthy GDP and for the country as a whole, these were the boom times but it didn’t feel like it in parts of northern England. Then again, it never really did. Times were always tighter here than elsewhere. And that’s when the flood hit Hull.
Home is our last refuge and we retreat to our houses when we’re under siege. To find it full of water is more than anyone can bear. The damage is always massive and the despair absolute. It feels like the end of the world.
And whenever rising water hits a community, the insurance industry gets ready for its own flood - of claims.
In Hull, ten thousand homes had been affected by the floods and for many there was no chance of them making a successful insurance claim because for many people there simply was no insurance policy. The first thing to go when times get tough are safety nets.
I met up with a councillor who hadn’t been to sleep all weekend as he tried to work out how he could help the people who’d elected him. He was bloody furious. He spread a map out on the bonnet of my car.
“You want to know which areas are flooded? Look at the map - look at which areas are below sea-level, look at which areas should never have been built on.”
Over 10cm of rain had fallen in one day. The city’s drainage system had been overwhelmed and when the pumps failed the lowest lying areas were inundated.
Water will always find a way.
On the Monday morning, two days after the rains, I pulled into the housing estate, expecting to find it looking like a lake, but the streets were empty and dry. I climbed out of the car, walked round to the boot and put my normal length wellies on instead of the waders. I grabbed my microphone along with a BBC ID card to prove who I was and set off to start door knocking. It was easy to pick which houses to call on first - the ones with the pile of carpets and furniture at the front door, waiting for the scrappy.
Even though the flood waters had slunk off a couple of days earlier, they’d left behind a calling card - an unimaginable stench. There was nothing agricultural or ‘earthy’ about the stink - it just smelled of shit. It was in every garden, gully and crevis. Thick, identifiable, human sewage. I knocked on the door of one house and a young woman answered. I explained who I was and asked if she had any insurance to cover the damage. She laughed. It’s at this point I always worry in case the person answering the door thinks I’m an insurance company loss adjustor (surely one of the most loathed jobs at times of disaster) but I wasn’t wearing fancy wellies and a high-vis jacket so I obviously passed the humanity test. I went in. The front door led into the kitchen, which was also the dining room and lounge - a big open plan space with wood style vinyl on the floor which was already starting to buckle and lift as it dried out. The stairs carpet had been ripped out and thrown outside and half way up the walls, all round the downstairs, was the line showing how high the flooding had been. The water line was shit-brown. From the top of the stairs, two little faces peered down at me.
“The kids are having to live up there ‘till we get it all sorted out down here,” Michelle told me.
26 years old, a partner who was working away, two children under five and a house made of breezeblocks and softwood - she wasn’t having it easy. All the downstairs plaster would start to disintegrate over the coming weeks and it would lead to a cycle of work that would take up to a year to complete. She had no insurance, no way of getting any extra help and no idea how she was going to pay for it all. Charities would be there for her in the weeks ahead but right now she was on her own.
“Do you want a cup of tea?”
“Please. White no sugar,” my eyes looked around the kitchen. “You’ve got a new fridge then?”
“No. We just cleaned out the old one,” she told me.
My eyes widened and I rapidly tried to explain that with the amount of raw sewage that had swept through the house it really would be for the best if she threw it out and put a hammer through the door to stop people trying to flog it on the second hand market.
“There’s no need - we gave it a really good clean. With bleach. Mind you, we had to,” she said. “When we opened it… well, there was a great big brown turd in there.”
She paused.
“Wasn’t one of ours, though. Now, did you say you wanted milk?”