Alan Winstanley: Thin end of the dredge for victims of flooding

Where possible, home owners try to scrape along by living upstairs, with caravans or outbuildings offering sanctuary away from the mayhem that the floodwaters have left behind.

There is much cleaning up still to do, especially as sodden sandbags can themselves become contaminated over time which makes them health hazards in their own right. More problems lie in store, though, given that the North Lincolnshire coastline was hit by a surge of salt water and the after-effects of salt and corrosion have yet to be seen.

I’ve seen insurance assessors busily documenting every last item that is dumped into a policyholder’s skip; literally everything from boxes of matches (“Qty. 3”) or a cherished photo frame up to ruined white goods; entire rooms full of furniture and everything in between are being totted up by recovery agents, ready for the time when a spreadsheet puts a final figure on people’s misery.

Some residents are very fearful about the impact the flooding might have on their insurance policies. Having cover withdrawn altogether could complicate their mortgage arrangements or an unaffordable policy excess of £10,000 or more – peanuts to a London stockbroker – would add to the spiralling costs already shouldered by devastated householders.

Throwing things into skips does not come cheap and one home owner in North Lincolnshire has already seen £9,000 in insured clearance costs after losing his home’s contents to the tidal surge last year. He pointed out that when the south Humber villages of Barrow Haven and South Ferriby were flooded in December, hundreds of homes were damaged, a picturesque hotel was put out of business and some 750,000 egg-laying hens drowned, but the national media barely blinked. Forty homes down south are threatened and the sky is full of news helicopters.

The same home owner was keen to commend the local authorities this time round; having learned much from the flooding of 2007, staff from North Lincolnshire Council were on hand the same day trying to help stranded or distressed residents. Individuals all did their best, and in a rural area where making a mobile phone call can still be a challenge (not even 3G for us), pot-holed roads can break a car’s suspension and septic tanks can be commonplace, any practical aid was welcome and much praise was reserved for the local council workers who pitched in to help.

This brought us to the subject of how local waterways, drains and ditches are managed today compared with many years ago. The short answer seemed to be that, in many cases, they’re not. Some 20 years ago bodies such as the National Rivers Authority and local drainage boards oversaw our network of waterways quite efficiently. In vulnerable areas near riverbanks, for example, there were strict rules about where home owners could plant trees, shrubs or build groundworks, and anything that might undermine the function of a beck or river was forbidden. Ditches and drains were on the whole well maintained to ensure that water flowed through them efficiently enough.

They were cleared out and dredged as needed and were inspected maybe every year or so. It was incumbent upon residents to understand that free-running drains and ditches were an essential part of our countryside fabric and were not to be interfered with.

With the advent of the Environment Agency, gradually the detailed knowledge of our highly localised waterways, ditches and dikes seems to be disappearing along with the will to maintain them properly.

Down at grass-roots level, there are fewer routine inspections if any at all, ditches are allowed to crumble or become overgrown and the ability to drain our countryside is undoubtedly suffering. Innocent householders moving into a vulnerable area for the first time may see nothing wrong in building features or planting trees that previously would have been forbidden, especially if their neighbours have already done the same thing and got away with it.

Some home owners are taking the opportunity to re-design and re-decorate their property, and modernise their appliances to bring domestic life more up to date. It’s little compensation for enduring all this misery, but it helps.

As we have seen, flooding brings many consequences and some of them have yet to materialise. Although a flooded householder can throw out the old and bring in the new, some things are best left unchanged and the old ways of managing our drainage and waterways were the best. Drastic action is needed to rectify the damage caused not only by the floods but also by several decades of neglect and abandonment.

• Alan Winstanley is a freelance writer in technology from North Lincolnshire.