Flood II

Today

Once again, we discovered that torrential rain had overpowered the gutters at no9, chucking water at the small bedroom windows and sending water running down the rear corridor. Fortunately, Frank and Maureen had popped in and stemmed the tide using my towels. Frank made some further adjustments to the door's own drainage system to try to make the water run away, rather than inside.

That's the 2nd time in a month - just one of the hazards of owning an old property, one might think.

In My Day

Certainly, older properties were, even at the time of building, less protected from the elements and wear and tear does take its share.

I don't remember large scale floods at 4bh; the effects of the elements were far more subtle, just as damaging and a lot more sinister.

I guess we had colder winters then; certainly there was often a cold snap and Daddy would start to worry about our water supply which was provided by lead pipes between the floors. Now lead is a relatively soft metal which doesn't expand and contract very well. For reasons that I don't understand, our pipes were never lagged. Water would freeze in the pipes, expanding and causing a split somewhere in the weakest point of the system. The trouble was, you couldn't tell whether or where this might have happened until the water thawed, when water would then leak through the ceiling.

This might be given away by a brown patch on the ceiling or a wet patch on the floor. Often you could hear the "drip" "drip" but not see it and some detective work was needed to find its location. Buckets were requisitioned to catch the water. Dealing with the leak involved taking up floorboards and applying a blowtorch to the affected part until the lead melted and rejoined.

The whole process was quite spooky, we feared this insidious internal destruction of our house deep within its structure. I was always anxious in case the ceiling came down or we were engulfed in water.

We used to call this phenomenon simply "The Drip" and it caused as much fear as any Stephen King film, especially to Beatrice who was absolutely terrified and probably would have preferred the weather to be freezing all year round, rather than endure "The Drip", dip-dripping.

At least at the flat our purchase of an extravagantly high-quality carpet has been justified as it's simply shrugged off the dirt.