Cameron, who was due to talk to Environment Agency officers and firefighters, seemed taken aback. He asked what she needed now and urged her to "get on to the council", but she replied that "they all decided to go on holiday".

"The Environment Agency said it was up to the council and when I did get through to the council they said if you need sandbags, get your own," she later said. Her grandmother's walnut-veneer cabinet was ruined, chairs were upended and her Christmas tree was about the only thing that was standing.

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.

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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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?

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...