AFTER THE FLOOD

Useful things to know if you've been washed away

It’s 10pm. I’m loading up my new car with a few bits and bobs, and closing the front door of my sort-of-used-to-be-home.

Of the fifteen houses in the Close, twelve are dark. Many of my neighbours have moved out, leaving behind houses that are uninhabitable, some already with their floors and walls ripped out, some just vacant, awaiting months of repairs.

This is a community that has almost literally been washed away. I can’t speak for the others, but my mood is as dark as the scene before me. In the last few weeks I’ve done what I seem to do best, switching off my emotions, and just ploughing on with all the things that needed doing.

I didn’t get angry at the insurance companies that didn’t call back when they promised, or the car mechanic who sent me away, swearing blind he hadn’t booked my car in for an inspection that day, or the solicitors who sent me an answer to someone else’s query, quoting completely the wrong price for completely the wrong case.

I do think I’m good in a crisis, but only for a certain definition of good. I can assess the situation, make decisions, and get on with things. And if you’re the one having the crisis, I will do those things for you without question.

But the price I pay is that I become too practical. I don’t allow myself to feel.

I’m pretty sure, however, that those feelings are going somewhere. I’ve withdrawn into myself. I don’t want to talk to anyone. My personality is in power-saving mode. Worse - I’ve become resentful of anyone who seems to be having a good time - hell, of anyone who’s just having a normal time.

I certainly did go through several stages of emotions quite quickly. In the first week after the flood, I got some weird pleasure out of telling the story of that night to anyone who would listen. In the second week, the grief started to set in. I had lost my home, my sanctuary, my safe space. The house that was perfect for my needs. My home studio, the place where I could roll around on the floor with my kids, or sit and gaze at the garden.

Now, a month on, I feel like I have collapsed in on myself. 

In the last few years I have really tried to be there for my friends, tried my best to just be present for them in their times of need. Despite my own troubles, I’ve had the emotional bandwidth to, hopefully, really hear them, really be with them.

Now I have closed down. I have no patience for anyone else’s drama. I don’t like it, but there you are.

But, given that I’m best when I’m doing something practical, I want to share some of my experiences, to give you a few bits of information, and things to think about, should you also find yourself with a small part of your life to rebuild.

Dry Fibre, Damp Customer Service

Given what I do for a living, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I live the most high-tech life imaginable. You might expect I have all the latest everything in my techno-palace. But if the fibre companies won’t install superfast broadband in our village, and if the nearest fibre-to-the-cabinet cabinet is something like a light year away, I have no special powers to get my connection speed above 25Mbps. And since I regularly upload and download hours of broadcast quality video, spare a thought for my computers, which have spent many a night, weekend, and bank holiday shifting hundreds of gigabytes of data to and from Click HQ.

So you can imagine my joy when an actual fibre broadband service did arrive in my street, and a 1 Gbps line actually turned out to be cheaper than my existing string and yoghurt-carton line. I signed up. It was connected. I was like a kid with a new toy. 

I would tell everyone about it. I would do speed tests over and over again for no reason. My streaming services looked better. I could upload hours of Click camera footage in minutes. My internet was so powerful, I warned the edit suite at HQ, that, along with the footage I was sending to them, it might accidentally suck me up the line too. 

For five glorious days I lived the dream. And then, the flood came. 

I assumed the fibre was done for, but miraculously, once the power came back on, it was still there. The one gigabit line, still wifiing around the house as if nothing had happened.

My neighbour’s copper-line connection across the road was dead, but mine - perfect.

What happened next, though, brought me right back down to earth.

Since I was going to have to move out for a long time, I needed to cancel the contract. After describing what had happened to the provider, I asked if they might waive the early termination charges. These were, after all, extraordinary circumstances. 

No, they told me, they would not waive the charges. There is no clause in the contract that covers having to leave one’s home due to disaster. I would have to pay the full termination fee, which comprised the rest of the contract - in my case, all two years’ worth. Some £370. Nice.

I did a bit of digging. I wanted to know whether there is any way of protecting oneself against this rather unusual situation. Maybe it’s covered under buildings insurance? After asking Which? Magazine and the Association of British Insurers, the consensus was: no. Early contract termination fees are not generally covered under insurance.

But then - a lucky break. It turned out that, simply by chance, because I’d only just had the fibre installed, I was still in my 14 day cooling off period. Which meant, for entirely non-flood related reasons, I was able to cancel my contract without a penalty. So I cancelled it.

Only then did I contact the press office of this particular broadband company, to see if they really did have a home disaster policy that their staff weren’t aware of. I was told that “each case would be reviewed individually”, and the “customer care team would discuss event details and account history to ascertain whether an Early Termination Fee would be applied”.

Well, having discussed it with me, they ascertained that they would hammer me for the full whack for something I couldn’t use.

I do understand that these companies spend real money on hooking customers up - they have to pay engineers to lay the cable, regardless of whether that line is then cancelled. And I’m sure customers come up with all sorts of stories to get out of a contract early. But maybe there’s a way of applying a little bit of compassion to those who have a genuine reason?

At least in the days leading up to the cancellation, I was able to help my copper-line neighbour whose work-critical Internet was still out of action. By putting one of my wireless repeaters in my front window, and one in his upstairs window, I was able to jump my superfast connection across the road to his bedroom office. God help any birds who flew through the line-of-sight between the two. They would have either been fried, or uploaded to the edit suite.

Write-off your car, and buy it back

This was a serious flood. We didn’t just lose houses, we lost our cars too. One of my neighbours’ vehicles filled up to the cup holders and died where it was parked. Their other car started, but the warning lights on the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree. 

“…yes, I think the spark plugs might have got wet…”

When I finally thought to check mine, there were pools in the footwells, but it started fine. A little cough and splutter from the exhaust pipe, but no warning lights. I might have got away with this, I thought. I called the insurance company, described the situation, and they said they would write it off, if I wanted. If I considered it safe to drive, however, they would still insure me. Confusing.

So what to do? It drove fine. Was it really worth losing the car I know, love and trust, because of a bit of water? 

This was when I found out that there is a third option. You can write your car off, and then buy it back from the insurance company for a lower price. You still get a payout, albeit a bit smaller (and there are insurance implications from doing this), but if you really want to keep your car, and you think you can fix it, this is one way of doing it. Remember, writing a car off doesn’t mean it’s undriveable - it just means the insurance company thinks it’s beyond economical repair. 

My car had no structural damage, so should I take this third way, and use the payout to get a really good service to clean it up?

As it turned out, all the advice I received was to not keep the car. A really good valet had made it look as good as new, but apparently the seawater was likely to have come into contact with electrics in the floor, which meant corrosion would set in within months, and the whole thing was a ticking timebomb. And as it happened, the write-off value for my car turned out to be not far off what I paid for it in the first place. We can all thank COVID for this phenomenon, which slowed production of new cars, and consequently pushed up the value of the second-hand market.

But it’s good to know that there is a buy-back option, should your beloved motor be beyond economical repair according to your insurance company, but not according to you.

Home Insurance - surely everyone has it, right?

No. No, they don’t. I couldn’t believe it, but there are at least two incidences in my village of residents who did not have buildings insurance. They did not have buildings insurance. That’s buildings insurance. They didn’t have it.

Insurance does seem like a pain to anyone who hasn’t ever needed it. But I’ve now seen first-hand the difference between the haves and the have-nots. When you have it, contractors are engaged, huge dehumidifiers are brought in, repairs begin, and, most importantly, residents are given other places to stay - hotels, holiday rentals, wherever, with all reasonable costs reimbursed without question.

But one rental tenant was shocked to discover that their landlord had no buildings insurance (yep, still worthy of italics). It seems that letting agents aren’t obliged to check up on that fact either, which, if you ask me, is disgraceful. That tenant arguably had a reasonable expectation of protection, and yet, when the house was deemed uninhabitable, with no working kitchen and a mouldy damp atmosphere that made it unsafe to sleep in, they were not relocated. No contractors sprang into action.

The house in question stayed wet for weeks before any work began at all. 

But most heartbreaking of all was the elderly resident who had accidentally let both their buildings and contents insurance lapse. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But I think you should take a minute to do just that. It’s a tragedy.

Suddenly those annoying and over-priced auto-renewals make a bit more sense.

People want to say the right thing - they often don’t

Honestly, I think I am now coming out of the other end of my darkest point. I’ve got a replacement car, I’ve been away on a foreign Click trip (which for me is blissful normality). But I still need to find a new rhythm.

I’ll get there. If we meet, I’ll tell you all about it if you like, but I’m happy to discuss other things as well - this whole debacle has dominated the conversation for too long now. And hopefully you won’t have to hunt around for something comforting to say.

Maybe it’s just me, but empty platitudes really push my buttons. “Oh, I’m sure it’ll be okay”. “You’ll get through it”. “Just ignore them, and find some new friends.” (no my childhood trauma is all fixed, thank you). Is it a British thing, or does it happen elsewhere too? That desire to say something helpful?

The problem is most of the time there is no quick fix, no easy solution, nothing that will help you stop the pain of the person in front of you. And so many people seem to resort to saying something that sounds helpful, and then leaving it at that. Maybe it makes them feel like they’ve done something.

“Dehumidifiers - that’s what you need, Spen”. Thanks. I know. 

“Always take a backup of your data, Spencer”. Cheers. I did. But your work here is done, so thank you.

People mean well, of course they do, and maybe most normal people would receive the good wishes and sympathy in the manner in which they’re meant. 

But me - eurgh. Ever since I have been aware of empty platitudes, I’ve tried to avoid giving them. I refuse to pretend I have all the answers, because I think the friend in need in front of me deserves better. If I can’t fix it, I will say so. “That sounds really awful, I am so sorry. This will have knocked you for six, so if you need to talk, I’m here”. For me, this recognition of what’s going on inside is far more valuable. 

“If you need anything, let me know”. If you say it, mean it. If you can’t make that kind of promise, that’s also okay. It’s a big ask to be on call for someone, and I wouldn’t expect it from anyone but those closest to me.

Actually, I think what I need most from people right now is flexibility and understanding. I hate changing plans that affect others, but right now I ask for licence to do exactly that. I may need to meet a loss adjuster or an engineer. I may not have the right stuff with me, given that at the moment I’m living out of bags and boxes. I may need to do that thing that’s slipped my mind due to all the things I now have to do.

The positive final thought

As I said in the last dispatch, this has been quite a minor life-changing event in the grand scheme of things, and I still have most of the tools I need to go about my business. Yes, all the added phone calls, appointments and having to Wait In Line are an enormous time suck. But I still have my health. So it could all be worse.

Am I okay? Probably not.

Will I be okay? Probably, yes.

Thanks for asking.

And next time, I promise I’ll talk about something else.