http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013 ... ed-village

It does sound like they were just left to it, though how much should you prepare/can ever be ready for yourself?

Big society at its finest!

Am I the only person wondering why, if her Grandmother's walnut-veneer cabinet was so important, she hadn't already called in a few burly neighbours and moved the thing upstairs? Surely with the couple of days warning we had about the storm coming in it would be prudent to take everything you care anything about and move it upstairs before anything actually happened?

We're in the Midlands and nowhere near any significant water but we battened down our hatches, sorted out soak-aways for the poultry and our Jewsons has had sandbags for sale at £1 a throw during the storms we've had, we know that if we have a power cut we're in deep trouble because of the fish and snake being temperature dependant so we've got a £50 mini-gen to run the tanks and viv in case the worst happens. I know there's limit to how prepared you can be for any eventuality, but ineffectual hand-wringing followed by blaming the council and the government is probably the lower end of that limit.

Disclaimer: I don't know all the details and only have the side of the story told by the media.

A proposal to build a earthworks burm – a raised mound – around the village was not taken forward following consultation with the local community, partly because of its aesthetic impact on the village, said Andrew Pearce, the Environment Agency's area manager for Kent and south London.


So there were plans to give them some protection but it wasn't pretty enough for the residents, my cup of sympathy is failing to runneth over

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No. You are not alone. If you are in an area where you are prone to be flooded you really should be aware of the risks. Even if not then you should be aware of any potential risks of flooding like the front door is at a lower level than the ground around it, or that rain water would flow towards the doorways.

Over here we get a lot of flooding, especially in the East. It is usually down to the town / village council to provide the help. They work hand in hand with the THW, which is a rescue service run like a retained firebrigade - they have their normal jobs and get set free to work with the THW when there is a disaster or there is a warning of a disaster coming, like flooding. Usually the mayor of the town is up on the hastily built dykes and helping spread out the sandbags.

Houses on stalks. Every time we get stories like this, and people moan about building on flood plains, I get angry because there is historical architecture out there that should be pointing the way for building in such areas.

But the narrow mindedness of planners, local residents who rail about such things not being "in keeping" with local architecture means that the wrong kinds of houses are built.

Piloti, people, piloti.

The thing I don't get is the lack of emergency provision by the power companies. It wouldn't be hard, if they knew a set of houses were going to be offline for a few days, to put a fuel powered generator in to provide power for say a few hours per day to those people to at least allow them to do some cooking or whatever. If you lose water supply for a couple of days your water supplier is obliged to bring in a trailer tank and keep it topped up so you at least have some water. I know you won't actually die from the lack of electricity but is anyone really going to argue that in the 21st century a working electricity supply is a luxury?

How many generators should the power companies have on stand by? 1, 100 or 20000? Who runs them, will they require constant supervision? Who gets those generators?
And of course who pays for them?

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Also what happens if they get nicked?

One assumes they will have statistics as to roughly how many homes are left without power during major weather events. They're billion pound turnover companies, you don't think they could afford to figure that out? You think the water companies who do have a legal requirement to supply don't figure these things out and that the methods are somehow radically different?


Anyone with two braincells to rub together could figure out the answers to those questions. We're not talking about 2 stroke camping generators here.


Given they're private companies who make their money selling us electricity, we do. But frankly I don't mind a fiver a year on my bill to make sure some poor fecker doesn't have to spend next Christmas huddled round a candle eating cold beans out of a tin.

I mean, how much of a selfish bastard do you have to be?

Don't the water companies turn up with a truck full of wet stuff and allow people to fill buckets in the street and so on?

I'm thinking that if you hook up a damp house to a new power feed, they probably still can't work their oven because it's all wet, but now the cat is dead of electric shock.

Exactly. The house needs to be dried out, before you can restore electricity. Emergency shelter in nearby sports centres and schools is probably more important than an electric generator for a soaked house that would be a potential hazard if the power was restored...

Dear people of the UK.
If you don't want to be flooded, don't buy a house on a flood plain.

The guy I saw interviewed on the news hadn't been flooded. His house was perfectly fine, he just didn't have any electricity. Many of the power cuts were due to falling trees taking down overhead power lines or similar, nothing to do with flooding at all.
There were thousands of people who had no power that the power companies could have brought in short term measures to help, but they didn't. That's the point I was making.
But yeah, carry on.