THE NIGHT OF THE SURGE
This is what happens when the sea comes knocking
It’s 3.30am. Again. I haven’t slept more than four hours a night since the flood. I’m not in my own bed. I am too hot. I think I have a bit of a temperature, and some sort of chest infection. Probably a result of spending three nights sleeping in a damp house. Fortunately the stuff I’m coughing up is more barley sunrise than evening algae.
My mind won’t stop running through what happened. And its consequences. Maybe if I write this, I might be able to exorcise the thoughts. Maybe I won’t. But I’ll write this and see.
I know that during lockdown, when the brilliant Click team continued to make our weekly programme from our homes, many of you grew fond of my living room. In the never-ending sameness of us all being stuck in our houses, my sofa and cushions became a familiar, welcome, weekly sight for some.
So maybe this is for you too. I loved that sofa.
The first thing I need to say up front is that I was extremely lucky. I am a middle-class, financially stable person in a first-world country, who has insurance, and is whinging about 2 inches of water wiping out his possessions which he can afford to replace tomorrow if needed. Yes, I’ve been forced out of my house, but I’m not in Bangladesh, for goodness sake. I didn’t even need to be helicoptered from my roof.
In fact the more I write, the more I worry this might become a long, wending, woe-is-me tale, that also happens to smugly mention all the things I got right. But I need to write it. I would imagine the official name for what I’m doing is processing.
And I’ve learned some things over the last few days that I hope you’ll never need to know, but which I will pass on, y’know, just in case.
It wasn’t the Eclipse, but I think I’ll always think it was
On Monday 8 April, hours after the total eclipse had carved its dark mark across the US, a storm surge carved its own mark through our village. At exactly midnight, as the sun and the moon’s combined gravity were pulling on the opposite side of the world, we took a direct hit.
Tides are highest when the moon and sun are lined up with the Earth, either on opposite sides (Full Moon) or both on the same side (New Moon). And if you’re wondering why we get a high tide when both are on the other side of the world, here’s an explainer from my favourite astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst.
It was Eclipse day, so that’s automatically a New Moon. It was a Total Eclipse, which happens when the Moon is at its closest point to the Earth, appearing slightly bigger in the sky, completely blocking the Sun, and exerting slightly more gravity on our planet.
Because our village is next to the sea, we’re all very aware of the tides here. And even with all the eclipsical moonery of that night, the forecast tide height was a very standard 5.1 metres. Enough to come a little up the High Street from the harbour, but nothing the village hasn’t seen a thousand times before.
However, the Moon and Sun weren’t the only two things that aligned that night. There was also incredibly low atmospheric pressure that pulled the water level up, and a storm force wind blowing in precisely the wrong direction.
So when the sea came in, it kept coming in. Up the High Street, and, for the first time in history, round the corner to my part of the village. Never in living memory had it troubled our houses on the higher ground.
From the videos I’ve seen, the water was at least 50cm higher than forecast. I didn’t film it myself. I, like most, was too busy.
Saved by an eye infection
For the last few months, I’ve been seeing a specialist about a weird condition in my eye. It seems like my body has decided my right eyeball is an alien organ that needs to be destroyed (auto-immune condition, I think they call it, but I prefer Civil War). I spent the whole of Monday morning getting prodded and poked at the hospital, and as a consequence I failed to finish my day’s work before the evening pub quiz.
The Click film I was working on was needed in the edit the next day, so after our quiz team absolutely smashed the competition (apart from the six teams with higher scores, but who’s counting - not the landlord, certainly), I got back on my laptop, and finished the rough cut I’d promised them at Click HQ.
It was 11.30pm, the curtains were closed, I ascended the stairs to my chamber. The wind was howling. There were voices outside. Probably the neighbours watching the water coming up the High Street. You know, like it’s done a thousand times before.
More voices. Better just take a look out the curtains to see what’s what.
And there it was. The sea, filling our front gardens.
I opened the front door. The water was creeping up the step. I closed the front door. The tide is turning right now, I thought. It should start to go down imminently. Seconds passed.
Then it started coming in through the bottom of the door.
What I did next can be filed under “unreasonable hope beyond hope”. I went to get all my towels and piled them up by the door.
Hopefully it’ll just be a trickle. Because the tide is turning. It should start to go down.
The trickle became a flow. It wasn’t going down. It was still coming up. And I was trying to fight the sea - with towels.
Ten minutes later all my towels were under two inches of water. I was an idiot.
An idiot with no dry towels left.
Save the memories - everything else is just stuff
I overthink most things. I’ve normalised it my whole life, but my mind is generally trying to do many things at once. If I’m listening to you, I promise you I’m hearing what you’re saying, but in the gaps I might also be planning how to get through the next day’s edit, or worrying about how to keep the kids entertained tomorrow. Or something more existential, like where I’m going next in life.
So unsurprisingly I already had a plan for what I would save first, should I ever need to get out of the house quick.
Number one, my NAS - my network attached storage. It contains all my photos, and all my music. It contains my life. A NAS consists of one or more hard drives, connects to your router, and gives you access to tunes, pix, and other files on any other device on your home network. Mine has two hard drives which mirror each other - so if one fails, there’s a copy on the other.
But despite my best plans, I count this as a partial fail. The NAS was above the water line, but by the time I saw that the sea had crept across the room, the power adapter was submerged, and the NAS was dead. My best hope is that the socket power tripped first, and the NAS just experienced a power cut, rather than a salt-induced surge.
But as I say, two hard drives, two copies. I won’t know till I get a replacement, but I’m hoping when I hot-swap the drives into a new unit, the memories will be there.
And if not, I still have the external backup I took at Christmas. And everything since then is still on my cloud storage. My file backup regime is, you will be unsurprised to hear, meticulous and anal. But also, I hope, justified.
Number two - memories, unicorns and cuddly cats. When I told my children the next day what had happened, my eight-year old daughter very nearly shattered my heart. “Did my drawings get wet?” she asked. I’ve watched her passion for art explode, and she’s rarely happier than drawing ever more imaginative fairies, cats, unicorns, caticorns, pegasi, and the occasional vampire (cat) with blood-soaked teeth. I’m sure everything is fine with her.
I keep all her pictures. And I saved them all, along with her cuddly toys, collected and played with over her whole life. I’m so glad I know what’s most important to my children - I don’t think I could bare having to tell them that their precious stuff had been ruined.
Along the way, my memories were whisked up and away from danger too - my Now That’s What I Call Music collection (yes I have them all), a chalk on cardboard drawing of the Lockdown Click logo sent in by a viewer. A homemade birthday card from one of the Lockdown Lunchclub.
Number three - my PC. It sits on the floor. Of course it does. I’ve never worked out why they’re called desktops, since they’re too big to actually sit on the desk - no, they always go under it.
Another fail here - by this point the water was not just coming in through the front door, it was coming in through the back door too, which meant I entered my office to see it creeping up the computer casing. As I lifted it, the cables to the power, monitors, speakers, webcam, keyboard, mouse, flight controllers (god why is everything so wired) snagged under the desk, and I stood there, unable to get the machine up onto the top of the damn desk it was damn well named after.
I reached out with a foot like some incompetent circus balancing act and dragged a chair over. Rested the PC on it. Hoped the cable tension wouldn’t be as high as that of the general situation, and drag it back down into the depths. It stayed balanced on the chair. The internal hard drives stayed dry. The insides didn’t. The body had died. But again, the memory survives.
Bring the power
I’ve been on the road for twenty years, and my companions have always joked about how heavy I travel. I take a massive suitcase even for a short trip, and my rucksack weighs a ton, full as they both are with cables, extension leads, adapters, and tea bags. My argument has always been that, until I can finally get that Einstein-Rosen Bridge working - the wormhole to the future - I can’t predict what one thing I will need in a hurry at midnight in some other country. So I take everything.
The people who scoff at my overpacking are usually the same ones who then sheepishly knock on my hotel room door asking to borrow an adapter.
With all the power sockets in the house off, and my phone down to a surely fictional 1% battery, I ran to my rucksack and pulled out a charging brick. I pressed the test button, and saw all four lights come on. It was charged. A quiet sigh, and a quiet win.
At least I could still contact the outside world if I needed to.
Old people are hard as nails. But just as scared as everyone else
I’d always joked that, come the zombie apocalypse, I’d want my 80 year-old neighbour on my team. She’s upright, ferocious, marches round the road with purpose, and speaks with a military clip that’s convinced me she’s ex-black ops.
She was the first one I checked on once I could leave my house, and I wasn’t at all surprised to find her mopping up on her own, having already tried to save a precious rug by bundling it onto her bottom four stairs. In the dark.
With all her electrics out, she had taken to climbing up and down over the sodden tapestry in almost total blackness, for which I told her off. I told her I’d move it somewhere safer, and then proceeded to not be able to lift it at all. As she insisted on continuing to long-jump over it, I got help from a neighbour to shift the rug, and at least make this the night she didn’t slip, fall and finally break herself. I would still need her, you see, should the zombies arrive.
But I got the feeling that so much of her life was in this house that her priorities had recalibrated, and I was worried that she would put her material possessions before her safety. This had been her home for many years, and she has repeatedly asked me since if she will have to leave.
I suspect beneath most hardened, dare I say, weathered veneers, most of us are scared, vulnerable, and unsure. Those who aren’t, well, I’m not sure I want to know anyway.
Except in the event of the zombie apocalypse, obvs.
Exterminate!
The rest of the night was spent bailing out two of my neighbour’s houses, the living room floors of which now resided a full 8 inches below the surface of the sea. Human chains of buckets, wheely bins full of water being heaved up the path, and then kicked over a ridge like the Daleks in that episode of Peter Davison’s Doctor Who, smashing sideways onto the ground and exploding their contents into the drain. It was definitely the most satisfying part of the night. One filled with camaraderie, a little laughter, some gallows humour, and lots of tea.
By the way, if you do that with the wheely bins more than a couple of times, you will break the lid.
End of part one
This is the story of the night of the flood - the aftermath is a newsletter in itself. In it, there are horror stories of home insurance gone wrong, broadband cancellation woes, and what happens to cars when they fill up with sea water.
I had planned for these postings to be full of cutting edge tech, and I promise most of them will be. But, the fact is this is my life right now, and I really hope you don’t mind being along for the ride.
For the moment I’ll leave you at the end of the first night. The tide had receded, the dawn came, and those of us who had stayed up all night began to survey the damage. I wandered home - for at the moment it was still my home. The water hadn’t completely drained from the house. That beautiful parquet floor had held a lot of it firmly in place.
I was going to need a bigger mop.
Excellent voiced article!