Floods...

[Gareth Hughes]

Just informed that Worsdsworth's House in Cockermouth, and Hill Top and the Beatrix Potter Gallery in Hawkshead have all been badly affected by today's flooding in the Lake District, among many other historic buildings.

 

[Penners]

That's a tragedy.

I suppose one could could argue that, being commercial enterprises and unoccupied (in the sense of a domestic residence), they should give less cause for concern than the homes of many hundreds of affected people. But it's difficult to avoid a feeling of particular sadness over such important national cultural centres.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Noooooooooooooooooo. Wordsworth's house was favourite until yesterday.

 

[JoceAndChris]

OK, it's that one http://www.visitcumbria.com/cm/wordhse.htm, not Dove Cottage as I feared. Awful nonetheless.

But Hill Top! I hope they're rushing round drying things out and saving them.

 

[biffvernon]

That's odd - Wordsworth's Cockermouth house was in the background of a shot on BBC news a few minutes ago. It was not in the water. And as for Hill Top, well, there's a clue in the name. Any water at Beatrix's front door would flow stright down the garden into the shop.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

The front door of Wordsworth's Cockermouth house is above a cellar, which is now full of water. It was the NT that reported flooding at Hill Top - revised now to "rainwater entering".
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/mai...news-unprecedented-weather.htm?campid=twitter

 

[Jon Maine]

Perhaps you all may wish to read this too.....


http://nemesisrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/11/national-trust-properties-devastated-by.html

It looks awful there.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Many thanks to Evelyn for keeping us posted on what's happening.

 

[Moo]

I've been watching it on the tv news. One poor chap had the water about six inches below his ceiling.

 

[biffvernon]

I suppose the real problem now will be the further damage done by well-meaning builders repairing inappropriately. Shouldn't we produce an emergency guide to how to not hack off lime plaster that could just dry out safely etc etc.

 

[Lime]

I suppose the real problem now will be the further damage done by well-meaning builders repairing inappropriately. Shouldn't we produce an emergency guide to how to not hack off lime plaster that could just dry out safely etc etc.

It's a nice idea but I think it is like spitting into the wind.
The floods are big money makers and usually paid for by insurance companies that know next to nothing about long-term care of old property.

The attitude taken to older houses is totally illogical.
People live for decades in an older house and never spend a penny on window repair except for painting them up.
Then they buy a new house, often saying that they will be pleased to get windows that open and don't need work doing to them.
The same people, 10-20 years on in their once-new house with plastic windows that have failed, rip out all the plastic windows and replace them with new at a cost of of maybe £30,000.
In my street this year three householders (that had 90 year-old wooden windows ripped out about 12-16 years ago) have had the plastic windows and doors all replaced again.
Just a small fraction of the total cost would have renovated the scrapped wooden windows for another 50 years at least.

 

[Penners]

The floods are big money makers and usually paid for by insurance companies

:shock:

 

[biffvernon]

And there was me, thinking it was owing to global warming, but no, it was the insurance companies producing all that rain.

 

[Moo]

Er - I think some wires have got crossed here, Biff.
The suggestion, surely, was not that insurance companies have caused the rain, but that they (and the builders they employ) are going to profit from the catastrophe.

 

[Penners]

No, I think Lime was right.

The insurance companies paid for the rain, in order to remind us all how important it is to have house insurance.

It was a kind of pour encourager les autres measure.

 

[Flyfisher]

I heard it reported that many of the affected properties could not obtain flood insurance due to previous, albeit less severe, flooding some years ago. Are such people really abandoned or does the government act as some sort of insurer-of-last-resort?

To digress slightly, I used to think that the principle of insurance was that the many paid a small amount towards compensating the few for rare disasters such as floods and fires etc. But the modern trend towards the micro-assessment of individual risks seems to me to undermine this principle.

 

[Penners]

You're absolutely right, FF - that's how insurance used to be, in the days of mutual societies.

Nowadays, the concept of mutuality has been replaced by the profit motive.

 

[Nina]

Although there are definite indications that our climate is changing and we seem to flood in this country on a regular basis, I don't think this is helped by the concreting over of so much of our land. People cover their front gardens with tarmac to make car spaces, we continue to build more roads, plane runways, shopping centres, supermarkets etc. This beautiful green land of ours gets less and less, and lack of natural drainage becomes a serious contributor to a problem that is going to get worse not better.

 

[biffvernon]

Yes indeed. But there again, in the grand scheme of things, Cumbria and Galloway must be about the least concreted parts of the realm.

This one was just down to a lot of moist tropical air meeting some cool arctic air. Brolly need is the only possible outcome.

The more global warming we get the more often this will happen. (Note heaviest November snow in living memory across most of northern China last week.)

 

[piapiapiano]

I heard it reported that many of the affected properties could not obtain flood insurance due to previous, albeit less severe, flooding some years ago. Are such people really abandoned or does the government act as some sort of insurer-of-last-resort?

From what I understand, when UK flooding started to be a vaguely regular thing, the insurance companies wanted to put their prices up. But the government got them to delay this for a few years while they worked on flood defences for the potentially worst areas. I thought this agreement had expired a couple of years ago, but it looks like they've just renegotiated the deal:

http://mainstreet-audio.com/info/2009/11/flood-issues-government-and-insurers-reach-agreement/