Video transcript: different viewpoints – Alison
Impact on householders

(Incorporates Lesson 2 – Alison (first paragraph))

I think it took us by surprise, because people who know that I live in Worcester associate it with flooding because of the river, but I’m so far away from the river, it never really entered my head that it would be problem even where we live.
I haven’t noticed the weather changes, but obviously this was just a freak weather condition.  We’ve had rain like that before and it’s never been an issue that we’ve even thought we’d be flooded, but suddenly this was such a freak amount of rain – I believe it was a month’s worth of rain in an hour, and obviously that’s going to have an effect on any property.

I thought the main way it affects you is that we’re just not ready for it, and it’s not something that we’re expecting, and so not only the financial awkwardness for you while you are waiting to go to it and pay out for all these new things and wait for the reimbursement, from a practical point of view my house was horrendous to live in for the few weeks afterwards, and then you have to de-humidifiers, and just on a day to day basis it gets you down, because you are trying to work around an environment that really shouldn’t be lived in at that time. Mine thankfully wasn’t bad enough to move out, but again, while you’re living there, that’s not ideal.  So financially, practically, it’s got huge implications.  The future is what worries myself and my neighbour most at the moment in terms of how it will affect our insurance premiums.  We are not sure, but we think it will.

Moving on, there’s nothing wrong with the houses, but property prices are undoubtedly going to be affected and people are going to be put off by the fact that this has happened in the properties that we have at the moment.  And future implications for the area in that the type of clay soil they’ve got and the type of drainage systems they’ve got obviously aren’t adequate for the kind of weather that we are going to be having.  Building new developments, it’s going to have to be something that they take into account, because certainly where our properties are built, and it’s clay soil and it used to be farmland, and obviously the minute it rained it used to be bogged down, and I believe what they’ve done is put numerous houses there, and not made adequate drainage arrangements.  I think probably that was the main problem with us was that the drains just could not cope with the deluge of water that they had, and I think if we are going to have these kind of weather conditions, [developers of] new properties are certainly going to have to think before they are developed on how they are going to accommodate those kind of issues.