After The Flood
Entry by: rodgriff
11th December 2015
After the Flood : July 2007
I watched the rain come down and the water rise all day. It wasn’t a great rush, like a tidal wave; just creeping inexorability. Is that even a word? There’s time to look it up - unbending, severe, relentless, unrelenting, implacable, merciless, cruel, pitiless. Yes that about does it; in the time it took to Google that word the water rose another inch. One inch of depth is about a meter of our driveway; a one in forty incline – about the same as the regulation fall in the sewer pipes under the drive that lead to the treatment plant. We were too far out in the country to have a mains sewer. I laid those pipes myself and we chose a plant that could cope under water, or so we thought.
I placed a brick on the drive at the water’s edge. An hour later I placed another, and another an hour after that until 4.30 in the morning when the flood peaked two inches from the front door. By then the garage was four or five feet deep, all the outbuildings were islands and the cellar was full of water. Somewhere in the barn nearest the house the chest freezer full of early fruits was floating. Unbeknown to me at the time the cement mixer too was afloat – making its own bid for freedom and drifting almost eighty yards before the hedge reminded it that it belonged to us. It was two days before we found it, somehow the water had risen under it and the bowl was big enough to provide enough lift to carry the whole thing away.
Surrounded by water in all directions I went to bed at quarter to five and slept for three hours. In the morning I watched as the bricks on the drive gradually reappeared. In two days the water had all gone but the mud remained, gradually drying and peeling back from the walls of the barn, coating the now immobile and damaged cars in the garage. We had an added treat, when the tractor went under the water the fuel cap floated off and the diesel drifted out. Our new mud, stolen by the river from countless fields upstream of us was now mixed with diesel. The good news was that it seemed to inhibit bacterial growth, the downside being that every item of property and every wall and floor that it touched reeked of diesel.
I had retired a week before the rain came down. The day it started I actually enjoyed being able to run around outside, revelling in the fact that I was not at work and could watch the rain gauge fill instead of checking it at the end of a fraught day. I could never have imagined that it would record nine inches before it too went under water. I still have a picture of me standing naked in the warm rain under a giant umbrella revelling in the freedom to do as I liked in our secluded rural retreat. In the photo I am carefree, laughing at the downpour, my mind full of all the great projects I planned to do now that I was done with the nine to five tedium. No more traffic jams, no more deadlines, no more burning the midnight oil to write papers no one would read.
I need not have worried about avoiding the traffic because we now had no cars; not only were ours wrecked by the flood, but every car hire place in the county was flooded too. For three weeks we could not go anywhere, in fact for a while we thought we could not go at all. The electronics controlling our sewage plant did not like being under four feet of water and stopped working. By some quirk of engineering the pumps packed in before the main tank was full of water and somehow a little space was left. Not one of the small mercies that one normally shares with friends, but one that kept us going none the less.
My idyllic retirement in the countryside became instead an idyll of cleaning and book keeping. For the next six weeks I jet-washed every wall and floor and itemised every diesel soaked possession, steadily accumulating a spread sheet of fifty thousand pounds worth of damage to show the loss adjuster when he appeared two months later. The cement mixer, that of the legendary journey, rewarded us for our care and attention by running again as though nothing had happened four months after the flood when the electric motor had finally dried out. As a token of my appreciation I changed the oil and re-painted it. The freezer in the barn might have joined the cement mixer in the hedge if the door had been open, but it only managed to move five feet. Clearly freedom matters to objects as well as people because, like the cement mixer, and unlike almost everything else, the feezer too rewarded us by working again after it dried out. I should perhaps mention the treadmill in the barn that I used to laughingly call my gym, that ran after the flood, but only flat out at about twentyfive miles an hour – I don't blame it in the circumstances, but I couldn't handle the pace.
Over the months, in what was left of that summer, floors were replaced, cracks in walls were fixed and many other things either forgotten replaced or repaired. At the end of the summer I had stents in my coronary arteries and my angina like the flood water went away. I realised that most of my retirement plans had gone too. Fortunately writing replaced all that was lost. It’s cheaper than golf and can be done in the dry with little equipment at any time of day or night, and I now know that ideas are waterproof and survive floods intact, unlike so many material things.
I watched the rain come down and the water rise all day. It wasn’t a great rush, like a tidal wave; just creeping inexorability. Is that even a word? There’s time to look it up - unbending, severe, relentless, unrelenting, implacable, merciless, cruel, pitiless. Yes that about does it; in the time it took to Google that word the water rose another inch. One inch of depth is about a meter of our driveway; a one in forty incline – about the same as the regulation fall in the sewer pipes under the drive that lead to the treatment plant. We were too far out in the country to have a mains sewer. I laid those pipes myself and we chose a plant that could cope under water, or so we thought.
I placed a brick on the drive at the water’s edge. An hour later I placed another, and another an hour after that until 4.30 in the morning when the flood peaked two inches from the front door. By then the garage was four or five feet deep, all the outbuildings were islands and the cellar was full of water. Somewhere in the barn nearest the house the chest freezer full of early fruits was floating. Unbeknown to me at the time the cement mixer too was afloat – making its own bid for freedom and drifting almost eighty yards before the hedge reminded it that it belonged to us. It was two days before we found it, somehow the water had risen under it and the bowl was big enough to provide enough lift to carry the whole thing away.
Surrounded by water in all directions I went to bed at quarter to five and slept for three hours. In the morning I watched as the bricks on the drive gradually reappeared. In two days the water had all gone but the mud remained, gradually drying and peeling back from the walls of the barn, coating the now immobile and damaged cars in the garage. We had an added treat, when the tractor went under the water the fuel cap floated off and the diesel drifted out. Our new mud, stolen by the river from countless fields upstream of us was now mixed with diesel. The good news was that it seemed to inhibit bacterial growth, the downside being that every item of property and every wall and floor that it touched reeked of diesel.
I had retired a week before the rain came down. The day it started I actually enjoyed being able to run around outside, revelling in the fact that I was not at work and could watch the rain gauge fill instead of checking it at the end of a fraught day. I could never have imagined that it would record nine inches before it too went under water. I still have a picture of me standing naked in the warm rain under a giant umbrella revelling in the freedom to do as I liked in our secluded rural retreat. In the photo I am carefree, laughing at the downpour, my mind full of all the great projects I planned to do now that I was done with the nine to five tedium. No more traffic jams, no more deadlines, no more burning the midnight oil to write papers no one would read.
I need not have worried about avoiding the traffic because we now had no cars; not only were ours wrecked by the flood, but every car hire place in the county was flooded too. For three weeks we could not go anywhere, in fact for a while we thought we could not go at all. The electronics controlling our sewage plant did not like being under four feet of water and stopped working. By some quirk of engineering the pumps packed in before the main tank was full of water and somehow a little space was left. Not one of the small mercies that one normally shares with friends, but one that kept us going none the less.
My idyllic retirement in the countryside became instead an idyll of cleaning and book keeping. For the next six weeks I jet-washed every wall and floor and itemised every diesel soaked possession, steadily accumulating a spread sheet of fifty thousand pounds worth of damage to show the loss adjuster when he appeared two months later. The cement mixer, that of the legendary journey, rewarded us for our care and attention by running again as though nothing had happened four months after the flood when the electric motor had finally dried out. As a token of my appreciation I changed the oil and re-painted it. The freezer in the barn might have joined the cement mixer in the hedge if the door had been open, but it only managed to move five feet. Clearly freedom matters to objects as well as people because, like the cement mixer, and unlike almost everything else, the feezer too rewarded us by working again after it dried out. I should perhaps mention the treadmill in the barn that I used to laughingly call my gym, that ran after the flood, but only flat out at about twentyfive miles an hour – I don't blame it in the circumstances, but I couldn't handle the pace.
Over the months, in what was left of that summer, floors were replaced, cracks in walls were fixed and many other things either forgotten replaced or repaired. At the end of the summer I had stents in my coronary arteries and my angina like the flood water went away. I realised that most of my retirement plans had gone too. Fortunately writing replaced all that was lost. It’s cheaper than golf and can be done in the dry with little equipment at any time of day or night, and I now know that ideas are waterproof and survive floods intact, unlike so many material things.
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