Being prepared for flooding.

[Jan Smits]

I have a flash drive with my whole laptop backed up onto it, as well as a hard drive - both stored on the first floor.

That is simply good practice for any data. Not something I've learnt very well despite a number of tough lessons. I do keep the most important stuff in places online now. Best practice is to keep a copy offsite, in case of fire.

I doubt this house will be flooded, if it is, Noah and his Ark will be sailing past me...

Same here, but I have been flooded elsewhere, fortunately when I was young enough to find the river in the house exciting with no need to worry about grown-up stuff like cost and precious items.

It doesn't always go off, usually if the water reaches a socket or a switch it'll trip the circuit breaker (elcb) for that circuit. The lights may be on but the power points are probably off.

Now you say that, yes of course, that's a very sensible explanation of what I saw. Never know when that snippet could be useful. Thanks.

[grenfell]

We had chosen last week to have a bit of a holiday and chose to go to York , well a couple of miles outside at least. It wasn't a spur of the moment thing it was preplanned , so just misfortune that we chose the wettest period. It did give us a chance to view at least some of it close up. Some of the parts of York actually flooded were coping quite well and carrying on , we had a pub meal towards the end of the week , all good but limited drinks as the cellar had been completely flooded ( and the staff room as the bar tender was telling us) . Closer to where we were the Ouse was a lake for want of a better word , fields had a lot of standing water and drainage ditches were either full or high. Knocked the walks a bit simply because I didn't want to traipse mud into the place we were stopping. We were able to view local tv of course and maybe the producers had concentrated on the worse cases or maybe the water rose very quickly but it showed quite a few houses where it was obvious no attempt had been made to move anything upstairs , and I'm not talking furniture and heavy stuff , books, rugs , soft furnishings even lifting things onto the kitchen table would have helped but wasn't done.
Personally I live in an area where flooding will only occur with the hand of a deity behind it but I have a story about flooding. Many years ago I worked at Ford Green Hall in Stoke on Trent an old historical building that had suffered flooding some time before. To counter future flooding the council built a bank around the building. This worked well until the water reached a point where it could go over that bank and flood the building once more. However , when the water receded the water inside the bank simply couldn't drain away leaving the hall in what was in effect a huge bowl of water to something like a depth of five feetish .

[Yorkshire Andy]

Those along the Foss had no warning they were "safe" due to the flood barrier... Till it was lifted.. Be interesting to see the final report on why they were forced to lift it at the moment it is due to the substation been at risk of flooding with York press showing men fixing it chopping out and replacing main feed cables into the pump power and control units. Which were charred and blackened which in my mind points at pumps been over driven

[grenfell]

Yes we spoke to people on just that subject but as you say nothing final as yet just different ideas ranging from incompetence to virtually conspiracy so we took it all with a pinch of salt.

[piglet]

This community took direct action themselves.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho ... 94286.html


Perhaps this is where they got their inspiration from?

http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_c ... eaver.html