Video transcript: climate change & lifestyle – Alison
Freak weather 

End of last April we had some flash floods and really freak weather conditions with very heavy rain.  Myself and my neighbour were actually affected by flooding.   Plantation Drive itself was actually quite submerged in terms of there was a car coming along the road that was submerged as far as its headlights, and that was all on the main roads, so obviously when we were lying a little bit lower than that, you’ve got a cycle path that runs alongside our house with a brook next to it, that obviously flowed over as well; so, put everything together and all the water had nowhere to go and converged upon our houses.
We knew it had been raining quite heavily and I went out to the garage to get something. It seemed to be quite heavy rain.  About half an hour later, I looked out the front door and the water was actually rising a couple of bricks high towards the front door.  The immediate reaction is to panic, because you are not really quite sure what to do about that.  It ended up, rather than coming in through the front doors, because it had rained so much recently anyway and the water table was quite high, the water wasn’t draining away anywhere; the drains themselves were obviously backfilling, and where you have air vents and ducts around the sides of the houses, the water actually came in there, past the damp proof and up through the house.  So rather than coming in through front doors, back doors, where you maybe could have done something about it, it was appearing through skirting boards, up through the floor and just pools of water all over the carpet which got worse throughout the evening.
The carpet in most of the downstairs actually soaked up the water, so although the carpet was irreparably damaged, the furniture wasn’t so bad because the carpet did manage to consume a lot of the water.  All the downstairs had to have carpets ripped out and they ripped out the kitchen because obviously it was chipboard and would have swollen and would have rotted from the water.  So a loss adjusting company came the night of the flood, or the night after the flood with the damage;   ripped all my carpets out, took most of my kitchen away, and I was left with industrial dehumidifiers – three in the house and two in the garage, that I then had to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a month after the flood.
Then when those have gone, you have to start the process of having somebody come round to measure for the carpets, and go through the process as you would buying anything from new. Mine was a little complicated in that I was away, and things didn’t get sorted before I went, so it ended up being July, three months later, when I found my carpets laid.  We finally had the kitchen refitted, but in terms of money compensation, it’s dragged on a lot longer. I think my neighbour is in the same position as me, in that now in January, nearly a year after it happened, we are still going through being compensated for electricity bills and odd parts of things in garages that you have to quantify how much you lost.