It was around Midnight (memories of Thelonious Monk) when I finally went to bed. I am now a golden oldie and enjoy the moments of going to bed on Saturday later than other days – the old memories linger of week-end late nights. As soon as my head hit the piller there was the soft pitter pat and soon the loud crashing of a torrential rain fall. This seemed to be the mega rainfall of the year. Hard to believe that it is now very late Spring and early Summer. It is more like April at the moment. I then had a memory of the neighbour ringing the door bell at around midnight (again) aome years ago, to tell us that our cellar was again submerged in water, and perhaps we should have a look. We did and were confronted with a hobby room with 2-3 centimeters of the liquid, a washing room which was half submerged and the cellar room with a developing lake.

This was an emergency, and there was nothing we could do. We were not the only parties affected, everyone had their own deluge to deal with. The only thing we could do at that moment was to  remove various objects soaking up the water and remove as much furniture as possible to dryer places which were quite scarce.

The photo on the left is our cellar which could have been used as a paddling pool. The next day dawned and we were not very happy. However, with the usual Swiss efficiency, the neighbour reponsible for such clalamities had already organised pumps and dehydrating equipment and the building insurance was informed, although to no avail. They were not paying. It had happened before and they regarded their responsibility as non-existent. You can bring your arguments, but the problem is a little more complex that it seems on the surface. I am not an expert, but there was really nothing to do in this respect. We had our own private insurance, but this never covered everything. After the flood the deluge as they say.

When we bought the hobby room about 2 years before this flood, it already had a fitted carpet. I was never a fan of fitted carpets, but it was already there. This carpet was the first thing we had to have removed and it was now a customer for the garbage.

Luckily the washing room had only a bare concrete floor at that time and as it had a tilt (which I had never noticed until the deluge) only the back half was covered in water. We used the dry space to store some pieces of furniture, as well as the corridor, which was one of the first places to dry out.

I remembered the memories of No. 2 son when he was doing his military service in the Swiss army – 3 weeks a year for many years – the swiss system. He was called up and at the same time there was was heavy flooding in the Brienz area of Switzerland. Their job was to help the population in the area. My son told me that he had never seen anything like it. Houses were ruined, farmlands were ruined. The local barns were full of the savd furniture and nothing very much could be saved. Everything had the smell of sewage and the houses full of flood residue. I remember it was an emergency and they had to leave the barracks in the middle of the night to get to the area. He realised the meaning of flood at the time. The nice side of it, if there was one, was that when the soldiers went to the local restaurants for a drink, they never had to pay. The village was so grateful for their help. This was a few years ago, and what family Angloswiss now had to face was not to compare, but flooding is not fun. It is not so long ago that Germany faced such a situation, which is still hovering and I dread to think what is now happening with these torrents of rain we have at the moment.

After our cellar flood the machines moved it. We had a dehydrater day and night situated in the hobby room and in the cellar room for at least 2-3 weeks. As the hobby room was most badly hit, this monster moved in (see below).

It is a super pump and pumped day and night for a month. The problem is not the water you see on the surface, but the water that has seeped into the lower layers. A hole was drilled into the concrete showing the remains of the water.  In the meanwhile our insurance had paid some compensation, but this was nowhere in comparison to the problems that we had. This monster octopus pump was eating electricity as if the famine had moved in. Eventually the machines moved out, we were proclaimed dry, and the furniture moved back in, although it was at least a year afterwards until we had our hobby room back to normal. This time no fitted carpet, we had a nice wooden laminated floor fitted, that could be removed very easily, plank by plank,  if this all happened again.

I am now writing these memories in the morning and up to now no emergency rings on the door bell, or neighbours in panic, so we survived the deluge again. In the meanwhile drainage had been built into our garage to avoid this happening again, and it works. The water now has somewhere to flow and no longer forms a river/lake in our underground rooms.

There are some events in life that you never forget and I could write a few pages over this event.  When I lay in bed listening to the rain cascading, old memorories return.

I have spent far too long on this piece of wisdom. I have other things to do than sit at a computer. Enjoy your Sundays wherever you are, take it easy and remember next Friday you can again look forward to the week-end.