The Fear of Rain

The other week the National Flood Forum took a group of Floodies to the EFRA Committee (online) meeting to talk about living at risk of flooding. Unless you have lived at risk of flooding, it is hard to understand what living at risk of flooding is like. That is why the EFRA meeting was so important. 

What they heard about, was the lived experience of flooding. 

Understanding the ‘lived experience’ of ‘something’ is very ‘en vogue’ (sorry to all you grammatical purists out there for that) at the moment. But it is also exceedingly important.

Why? Well, consider the question of ‘what is flooding?’.  Of course, there is a literal definition (courtesy of the Oxford English dictionary): the covering or submerging of normally dry land with a large amount of water. But that definition will not resonate with many people who are connected to flooding either through work or experience (never mind normally dry, should a lounge be always dry?).

Flooding means different things to different people. If your job is about alerting people when flooding is likely to happen, then in all probability your definition is about, well, probability. That is an upfront pre-emptive version of flooding. Where is it going to go, how quickly, how high, and hence who needs to be alerted?

If you work for a flood authority, then perhaps your definition of flooding is framed more about resilience and being prepared. The other response end to the timescale of flooding.

Which of course, begs the question, what is flooding to Floodies? Which is exactly what I have asked Floodies in my research (and this question is the focus of our – my fab Reading University PhD supervisors and myself – third research paper). This is such an important question, because if we do not understand how those at risk of flooding ‘live’ and therefore construct flooding, then how on earth are we (flood authorities and Floodies) going to communicate and work together?

Therefore, without wishing to steal the thunder from said third paper (and using separate quotes accordingly), I wanted to give you a taste of what it is like to live at risk of flooding and to experience flooding. This is really really emotional stuff (and I make no apologies for that) which I know will echo the experiences of fellow Floodies. 

When doing these interviews, the Floodie I was talking to often cried and I cried with them.

“The minute you get a met office warning in, you're on tenterhooks and we've had met office warnings every single day for like months on end at times and it gets relentless where you can't leave your house, you can't, you're frightened to go anywhere at all…… …..I'll probably break down now, because the minute you hear rain, you think I'm going to end up walking downstairs to a room full of raw sewage and tampaks and sanitary towels”

“If I am home today and its starts raining and it rains tomorrow I actually start getting a bit itchy and I'll put my boots on and I'll walk and look at some of the development sites, I'll go and look at the XXX brook…… ….I'll probably have a walk onto the farmers’ fields and say 'how bad is this?' and personally check it”

“I like holidays, culturally visiting places as well. And since I moved, I've not done anything. And it's, it's part of this fear of going away. Um, and the fact that you can't, you don't know the weather forecast, you can do it with a sort of, uh, a good sort of two to three weeks spell if you're lucky, but you can't book holidays with two to three weeks in advance”

“Now I was on holiday abroad and XXX was at home one time, there was loads of rain and um, XXXXX flooded again, I don't remember what year it was, but I was on the phone from Turkey or somewhere 'is the house alright, is the house alright?' because we'd read on Facebook that XXXXX station had flooded………”

“I do get frightened when we get heavy rain. I'm constantly looking out the window. I'm constantly looking at the river and the river levels. And then we've kind of got a WhatsApp group between ourselves and the neighbours. And sometimes if people are away and they've heard it's raining. And they'll text, text each other, you know, what's the river like? Is it coming up? I think we are all the same. We are all very cautious”

“I lost all my children's baby photograph things I'd kept from when they were babies and it was silly things like, and uh, when they came to try and clear all that stuff out and (I) said to them, if you see a, uh, a black box, it would be Granny's button box. And it was things like that. And I wasn't bothered about me freezer or, cause you know, I knew the insurance would pay for that. So, for quite a while afterwards, I was quite tearful. Obviously its 2 years on, coming up to Christmas as well, because all me Christmas decorations have gone, you know, I had to borrow (a) Christmas tree. I didn't want to do with Christmas day”

From these six quotes you can see that water in your home is only a small part of flooding. Flooding is much much bigger than that. 

Flooding is from the moment you get up in the morning and check the weather forecast through to going to bed at night and checking whether you need to put up your flood defences. 

Flooding is seriously considering whether you can go on holiday and if you do go on holiday who is going to keep an eye on your house.

Flooding is the loss of precious memories.

Flooding is the loss of security. Shouldn’t a home be a safe place?

It is important that everyone understands that flooding often means that life becomes dominated, if not blighted, by not flooding again.

Fundamentally, flooding is the unmaking of ‘normal’ life. And being prepared is not the answer. Yes, it plays a very important role in flood risk management, but it is not THE answer. 

The answer starts with understanding that flooding is so much more than water in someone’s lounge, and it ends with us working together to find holistic, integrated solutions, which includes being prepared, so that no-one has to live with the fear of rain.