Somebody on Quora.com asked “What does it feel like to have your home flooded?”
The most popular response came in from a survivor from two floods in Queensland, Australia. The whole thing is worth reading, but following are a couple of sections that jumped out.
The first is about how expectations affect behavior:
Prior to this flash flood, the area hadn’t flooded for 35 years, and in that time, a new dam had been constructed which would ensure it “never” flooded again. . . . Because it was considered so unlikely, I’d made zero preparations, in terms of lifting precious things to higher levels, because we just “couldn’t” be flooded. Consequently, as soon as the water started heading into our garden, I started running around the house frantically trying to think which things were down low and should be picked up. My then-8-year-old twin sons, and the dog, were running around after me, shrieking hysterically “We’re going to die! We’re going to die!”
The second, on the experience of flooding.
Back to the question of how it feels: it’s enormously disempowering. There’s really nothing you can do – practically – to stop a river. As you can see, no amount of sandbags would have made a difference. And you get paralysed and overwhelmed – or I did – when it was apparent (the second time) that the water was coming in. We could have moved some stuff upstairs – upstairs is much smaller than downstairs, though – but where do you start? The big stuff didn’t fit up the stairwell, anyway. And it’s all insured, and the kids were an emotional mess, so I preferred to spend my time reassuring everybody that it’d be OK, than moving “stuff”. After the first flood, all the wedding photos, external hard drives etc were upstairs anyway. So all you can do is sit and wait, and hope, and reassure.
Painful. Read the whole thing to get her perspective on how these events affected her kids.
“What does it feel like to have your home flooded?” on Quora.com.