General Chat

That was nice of you to apologise Graham and for Maryanna to accept. I think we all realise how heated feelings can get when livelihoods are threatened.

We have just driven out to the Newent side of Gloucester. It was like driving along a causeway with the road elevated above what appears to be lakes but what should be fields. This of course the flood plain for the River Severn and the canal. Thankfully the flood defences that were put in around the power station, that flooded so dramatically in 2007, have held. The floods on one of the roads (A38 to Tewkesbury) have subsided, still in the fields but the road is ok. However the Maisemore road (don't know the number but it the road taken towards Malvern) is still closed so must still be flooded.

Well said Graham and Maryanna :-)

Well, I shall see the plight, as best I can from a small distance, tomorrow when we see the in laws. They have been been moving as much fodder and bedding as they can out of flooded barns and outhouses. There is still a few weeks to go before the animals can get out to graze,that's if the fields ever dry out and they have lambing to contend with.

They are fortunate to be on the edge of the worst of it,but have also been helping friends and neighbours worse off than themselves.

And I do partly understand the predicament of those made homeless through no fault of their own, my own best friend lost everything, somehow or another her husband allowed himself to be conned out of their home and business, all bought on borrowed money. She was homeless with three children under eight. She stayed with various people but none of us could take then in full time and they wouldn't have been given housing if we had. It was nearly four years in the end before they got a permanent home.

, I have been deeply upset by your comments, Graham, but apology accepted, thank you. Please just try, along with everyone else to stay safe and dry and let's hope the weather improves, people get help via funding and insurance to get back on their feet again but I fear that it will take a long time and some of them will never get back to what was normal before all this happened.

Thank God also there has been no great loss of life either to people or livestock, property loss is devastating enough as it is and some belongings can never be replaced. All my precious things are in the loft, safe if the house flooded but if the roof were to come off, or we had a fire that would be that.

Sun is out here today at the moment but everything is so wet underfoot, rivers such as The Tone through Taunton almost as high as they can get and others like The Perrot, as we all know, well over their banks, some serious water removal machines on the Levels at present as well as in Bridgwater.

Stay safe everyone., M .

Namelessone you are right. I do have strong feelings about this. Having been homeless I know what it must be like for people you have been made homeless by situations beyond their control. I am not attempting to blame anybody for my problems. I only wanted to highlight the plight that many people are now in.
Maryanna I am deeply sorry for having offended you. I do not wish you any harm.

There has been an argument going in Berkshire about who is responsible for clearing up the raw sewage in peoples houses/gardens. Both the Council & Thames Water claim it is down to the other.

Not much help for those residents. :-(

There was a phone-in conversation on the BBC TV news from a flood victim in Kent. He was told that his claim might be reject, not because it was caused by a river overflowing but because it was caused by rising ground water. You can’t plan for that!

Although not as badly effected as Surrey or Somerset, some smaller areas in Kent have been affected. A supermarket checkout employee from Tonbridge said that the water in her home was up to her waist. But life goes on. :-0

Interesting piece this morning on news about the River Coker in Cumbria and teh town of Cockermouth. You will remember the terrible floods there is 2009 which affected many homes and almost every business.

They built new flood defences which look remarkably similar to the flood defences near me on River Rhondda. Both rivers are surrounded by high mountains that bring down masses of flood waters quite regularly. A lot of money has been spent locally in Rhondda at places like Trehafod to keep the valleys open and free of flooding. And Cockermouth has spent £4m.

Yes, lots of positives. Better flood defences, better community spirit etc. But the big problem in Cockermouth was insurance. Slow (not good when your house is filled with raw sewage) and businesses were refused insurance or premiums were so high that many are taking the risk themselves. So business life in particular is now on a knife edge in Cockermouth. That cannot be right. Can you imagine what the traders in Marlow will say if they cannot renew their flood policies.

Both the towns rivers have breached their banks a couple of times but nothing serious and the rivers were widened and re-routed years ago to reduce the flood risk to the town

AnnCardiff :-D :-D :-D yes that's quite an apt description of the governments initial response

saw a nice phrase in the media today - "It's only when the effluent hits the affluent that something gets done" :-D :-D :-D :-D

Graham

Thank you for going some way in explaining why you have such strong feelings but please don't blame everyone else for your problems.

Many of us have gone through very hard times. We almost bankrupted ourselves by buying a tiny cottage so we would have somewhere to go if we lost our 'works' house. For which (thanks to HMRC) we had to pay a hefty maintenance charge (i.e.rent). It is only due to an inheritance that we have been able to purchase our current home. (Yes - we were lucky)

Some 'second homes' are parental property that has failed to sell. Often these properties are not in very good condition because the parents were unable or unwilling to have their homes 'mucked about with'. We could not have let out my mothers house - in fact it was demolished.

Our 'other home' WAS available to others in an emergency but we didn't let it out because it was our own emergency accommodation.

I totally agree with Uzzi.

John there is no need for that I am sure.

Sarcasm is the lowest and most ill-informed form of wit.


However, this does bring up a good point. It is sometimes easy to forget whilst mopping out our parlours and endeavouring to rescue the finely crafted pieces of artisan pottery that we have just purchased from Bid TV that there are those worse off than ourselves and maybe we should consider the homeless at times like this.

Graham is only 17. And wet through. Have some sympathy :-D ;-)

Graham I am amazed and find it hard to believe how rude you have been to Maryanna. I too have been homeless and lived on the streets, now I own outright my own home IF mother hadn´t lasted as long as she did or we had done things differently I would have had TWO homes 1 in Spain and the other on the Isle of Wight.

Being homeless doesn´t make you rude or give you the right to abuse somebody else who through their own hard work and parents hard work plus their sense now own 2 homes. Their fear and worry for those homes are as genuine as anybody else.

Maryanna you didn´t have to explain and I feel for you that you felt you needed to.

NOBODY here has laughed and joked about the hardship that people are going through with the floods and storms.

I am struggling for words at the rudeness of Graham ..the last time I heard somebody being that rude was my Mother and I got told then to let it go as it was the dementia. !

Just have to say how I agree with bot Wendy (TS) and with John's first paragraph.

Nobody on here has been laughing and joking about the state of flooded areas anywhere, we have all be extremely supportive. I wonder if Graham was a supportive in 2007 when we in this area suffered catostrophic flooding, power cuts and water shortage. I hope so.

And it must have been a worry being homeless too, but I have not seen anyone saying they are hard done by having two houses. Actually Maryanna didn't even have to tell us that, it was, as she said, just her story.

If you are flooded Graham and in danger of losing property and belongings then we all sympathise with you. But being nasty and personal to one or more of us is not the way to go.

Absolutely right, TS. Also you can be very happy with no roof over your head, you can be very miserable and envious of someone who has a caravan. And if you are extraordinarily wealthy, you can be as miserable as sin. Graham might still be rude if he won £67m on the lottery. And envious, because people like the Duke of Westminster and Prince Charles were a lot wealthier than him and yet had done nothing to deserve all that wealth.

Rollo's post amused me. I had just been doing some reserach into the Jewish fliught from European pogroms in late 19th century. How they lived in places like Hackney. And also a town in Shropshire called Shifnal - a railway and stage coach town of 4,000 pop.

In both cases the families lived on 3 or 4 floors - and usually one floor was the workplace. It might be a shop, a saddlery, a tailors. But there were streets exactly like Rollo described. And if houses were built on the flood plain they were often called River Cottage, Mill House, Mill Cottage, Ty Melin, Glan yr Afon. And the residents were gamblers - if they lived in those houses, they took their chances in inclement weather.

And no one seems to mention this is the biggest flood since 1607, and may become even bigger that that one. It seems to me that the Government, teh agencies, the emergency services and the local authorities are coping rather well. And so are householders if you can believe the news. Resilence is incredible. Community spirit is amazing. And, as usual in these situations, heroes come to the fore.

Graham, my point is that however live treats a person it is no excuse for ill mannered rudeness and this is something you showed yourself to be guilty of.

I haven't seen anyone on here 'laughing and joking' about the terrible effects of the flooding so I'm not sure where you got that idea from.

This is what bugs me.

It is far from rocket science to work out which areas are prone to flood risk. Ancient areas liable to flooding used to be able to manage the problems for themselves ( Fens, N Somerset) until powers and funding were taken away to the gormless EA which just follows EU diktats and BBC Wildlife programs.

Despite half the UK population trying to find living room in the crowded SE quarter the obvious solution of building down town flats with businesses and services on the ground floor has been largely ignored. As well as using land more efficiently a downtown flats/biz mix is much more rational for transport.

Instead the UK has built a sprawl of ticky tacky housing all over the floodplains of SE England, the Severn Valley and further north the Trent, the Ouse and the Humber.

There has been next to no additional investment in water management, drainage, education or transport road/rail/bus. The inevitable result has been flooding and slow overcrowded journeys to work.

All of this might just self correct itself if market forces were allowed to go their way for building on the flood plains and areas such as the Fens and Somerset given back their ancient powers.

Yes, that means no affordable insurance, crash in property values and a big rethink about how and where to build. It won't happen because the banks could not take the loss on their mortgage loans.

Instead the government is about to enter into a stitch up with the insurance companies. The govt - (having failed to costruct the flood management defenses it promised to the insurers) - now proposes a new scheme to cap insurance fees for flooding.

Only in order the keep rates "affordable" new build, commercial property, rental and "upmarket" are excluded although they will nevertheless have to pay more. Quite what the "new build" exclusion will to the value of land banks and house construction targets heaven knows. Most likely it will be dropped.

I don't really see why householders all over the country should pay extra ins. simply in order to underwrite flood risk which in many cases is not a risk at all but a foregone conclusion.

If all else fails I suppose the UK could buy back Normandy and Picardy - the region is more or less empty and the bankrupt French govt could do worse than to sell out to the English rather than the Germans as per current policy. Wales could get Brittany which would be just on both Wales and Brittany.

We are all in it together but some of us are in to up to the neck.

:-D

Four years ago I was homeless. Sleeping rough. I didn't have a roof over my head. So I am not having anybody with 2 houses telling me they are hard done by. The environment agency and the fire brigade are currently pumping water out of neighbours houses, while they are staying in temporary accomodation. So don't expect me to come on here laughing and joking about it. Some people don't know how well off they are.

Oh dear :-0 :-0 When I was in my 20's and bought my first place (a flat in somewhere called Harrow-on-the-Hill), I bought it because it was cheaper living on a windy and exposed hill than living on leafy and lush banks of luxurious Thames.

I thought Staines under Thames was just as beautiful as Kingston under Thames and Marlow under Thames, but apparently not. Isn't Windsor Castle and Eton College in Staines?

How I envied those who lived on banks of Thames and had the choice of driving, training, tubing, sailing, even flying down the river to their hugely salaried jobs in West End and City. I have tried hard to curb my envy. And I seriously hope they all are safe and warm in this catastrophe and are able to rebuild shattered houses and gardens over next few weeks. Whether they have one, two or three properties.