The Cellar - What's more current than the weather?

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Floods are the dish of the week around here. Crazy rainfall most of Thursday and into Friday - then some more over the weekend. It's been calmer today but there may be more in a few days.

Some parts of Doncaster affected when the River Don burst its banks, Sheffield saw some flooding too and I think Rotherham.

A few places in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire were caught as well.

There has only been one death, I think, with a woman who was swept away when the River Derwent broke its banks.

Compared to some of the floods in other parts of the world it is relatively small scale, but it is still impactful, and some places are on high alert for further trouble. The somewhat ironically named village of Fishlake is currently a major concern.

needless to say it's been very busy at work this week :P

Aside from the uptick in claims and the fact that our drying and restoration / cleaning company is now almost completely taken up with flood claims - making it very hard to organise drying for a routine, but just as critical loft burst claim, a small group of handlers went over to Doncaster with the incident response van on Saturday and Monday which meant fewer of us in the office to deal with the increase.

At least our policyholders have insurance - some people don't, and I can't imagine how devastating something like this is for them. Even for those that do - even knowing their homes will get dried out and repaired - they are facing months of upheaval.

How you folks survive that shit is beyond me. I spent my whole life cold and this is why I will never leave Arizona.

115F summers are worth it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DanaC (Post 1041252)

Compared to some of the floods in other parts of the world it is relatively small scale...

Damn hard to maintain perspective where it's your shit underwater.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Luce (Post 1041253)

How you folks survive that shit is beyond me. I spent my whole life cold and this is why I will never leave Arizona.
115F summers are worth it.

With the climate change you'll be able to visit Utah, and maybe during a heat wave Colorado. :haha:

Nothing quite like the smell of black mold in someone's home.:(

Quote:

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce (Post 1041257)

Damn hard to maintain perspective where it's your shit underwater.

With the climate change you'll be able to visit Utah, and maybe during a heat wave Colorado. :haha:

It's more likely that everything North of Boston will freeze solid when the gulf current craps out. It's more or less already happening (the gulf current slowdown.)

We here in the high desert will be setting up barricades. We don't want anyone from New Hampshire screwing the place up like they did to New Orleans.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griff (Post 1041267)

Nothing quite like the smell of black mold in someone's home.:(

Yeah. Not nice.

i've had a few heartbreaking cases this past week or so. One woman had spent most of her redundancy payout on doing up her house which her recently deceased father had left to her. She'd clearly poured herself into that house over the last 12 months and got it just right just in time for Christmas and bang - she's in a Travelodge living out of a suitcase while raw sewage is pumped out of the floor void from overloaded drains that backed up and flowed into several houses on her street.

Brand new kitchen fucked - brand new laminate flooring fucked - brand new fridge freezer fucked.

What's really sad is that most of our policies (most policies generally I think) only cover the damaged items in a suite not the undamaged items, so base units in the kitchen are beyond repair, but the wall units are fine, we only pay to replace the base units. We usually offer a 50% contribution towards the cost of replacing the undamaged ones, if there's no way to replace with an identical match, but for a full kitchen replacement, that can add several hundred, possibly a thousand pounds in out of pocket expense for the policyholder.

This shithole I lived in for a year had a ton of black mold.

I'm alright
Don't nobody worry bout me

Touch of bronchitis, but that's the weed, I had that before

Quote:

Originally Posted by Undertoad (Post 1041302)

Touch of bronchitis, but that's the weed, I had that before

Medical weed, of course. Many prescription medications have side effects.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Luce (Post 1041282)

Quote:

Originally Posted by tw (Post 1041110)

Buried power lines do not create forest fires.

Though you'd need to come up with about eight or ten times the price of overhead lines to manage it. Less digging the trench, I think, than conduiting the line and ensuring connections are permanently watertight. While out of sight and out of mind.

The immediate source of difficulties just all anywhere are California forests shorting the lines. Second place is probably transformer fires.

Quote:

It costs about $3 million per mile to convert underground electric distribution lines from overhead, while the cost to build a mile of new overhead line is less than a third of that, at approximately $800,000 per mile, according to a section on PG&E's website called Facts About Undergrounding Power Lines.

...PG&E, the state's largest utility, maintains approximately 81,000 miles of overhead distribution lines and approximately 26,000 miles of underground distribution lines. It also has about 18,000 miles of larger transmission lines, the majority of which are overhead lines.

At a cost of $3 million per mile, undergrounding 81,000 miles of distribution lines would cost $243 billion. PG&E has 16 million customers; distributing that expense equally would amount to a bill of more than $15,000 per account.

USA Today source

$243 Billion, so what? Deficits don't matter, and while they're being buried rake the woods. :rolleyes: