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Just after thoughts/experiences/opinions really. We live somewhere that absolutely won't flood - top of a hill, no nearby rivers etc but we've found a house we both like that has a small river at the bottom of the garden and is at medium risk of flooding.
It's in Cheddar and quite a lot of the place is classified at this risk or even higher. Head is saying no but we both like the place ......
I live 100mtr and 3mtr above sea level , so yeah medium risk. Never been under water but the sea has flooded the road and my driveway. TBH if its going to be over the door threshold theres not alot you can do. My door is up another meter so some level of protection. I have some blanking plates with silicone seals and nuts set into the aiirbricks so when I get the ping from the EA I can bolt these into place as the air bricks sit low down on the under floor crawl space. Never going to be watertight its more to stop the bow waves from the idiots with shagged 1997 Land Rover Defenders , snorkal and lift kit who pray for bad weather events so they can justify owning such a car.
They do tend to be over zealous and charge around playing Good Samaritan by towing people who have hydro locked their engines but raise the water levels by doing so.
Insurance is OK , have to declare it obviuosly. You could design a house to be flood resiliant with hard flooring , electrics wired in at waist height , but will have to accept its still a major issue if even an inch of water enters as it tends to carry effleunt with it
How realistic is the flood risk?
My building is apparently in a high risk zone. Its complete nonsense as the river at that point is held to high tide level by sluice gates and even if it did flood then my liability is close to zero due to the way the ownership works. I simply insured it without flood risk in the insurance as the premium with flood risk was absurdly high
Edit - the front door is 2m above high tide level - but the whole area is protected by high sea walls. Sea flooding is next to impossible - the firth would have to rise 3 or 4 m. river flooding is impossible as any rise in the level they simply open the sluice gates
they simply open the sluice gates
I'm sure they are well drilled on this at Leith but I'd not trust the presence of gates that require local authorities to have their wits about them to be closed.
We are house hunting and our concern isn’t actual flooding but how insurance companies will load houses with risk of flooding.
They get their knickers in a twist about anything so reckon that anything with even the slightest risk will come with a huge premium or a “we won’t pay for flooding “clause.
The weather around the world is freaky enough for us to now be looking at places that aren’t on the flood map.
I asked a similar question recently and someone said that insurance companies currently HAVE to insure but that runs out in 27 (?).
……double post
“ but I'd not trust the presence of gates that require local authorities to have their wits about them to be closed. “
I follow a weather forecaster on FB and he gets so much grief if he forecasts a named storm. This is because we have climate change deniers and freaky storms prove them wrong. I can imagine a Reform council actually forbidding flood defences because as we know all is as normal or flooding is gods will.
There’s plenty of stupid people out there.
Right.
Your biggest issue is insurance.
Until 2039 the government has commited to supporting the insurance industry for residential through FloodRe. After that who knows.
Thats when it becomes complicated. TJ might think he's sitting pretty but when the ground floor is abandoned things might get problematic. There are lot's of indirect issues with flooding. We did the flood mapping for sepa and promptly moved offices out of the high coastal flood risk 🤣
You can't open sluice gates if the sea level plus high tide plus storm surge plus big waves make it impossible. Unlikely for sure and we don't typically that absolute scenario lke that and add some sort of statistics voodoo to come up with "realistic" answers.
We really don't know how climate change will play out. Rather than think extreme events think about the level of disruption that you can cope with. If an event that happens on average once every 25 years becomes a once every 5 years or even more frequently is that viable.
I might not move out of a medium but i would not be moving in.
Guess what i do for a living 🙂.
@elshalimo @konagirl are clever and me with this stuff so hopefully they can
robola - for the river to flood my building the whole docklands area would need to flood first. Its forth ports not the council The dock gates are normally closed. IIRC there is a sluice bypass. It would require massive amounts of water as its the whole dock basin held at high tide level and there are multiple acres of water. the level of the river / dock basin never varies by more than a few cm. Its just not possible. The water level would overtop the sluice before it got high enough to spill out of the river
Just after thoughts/experiences/opinions really. We live somewhere that absolutely won't flood - top of a hill, no nearby rivers etc but we've found a house we both like that has a small river at the bottom of the garden and is at medium risk of flooding.
It's in Cheddar and quite a lot of the place is classified at this risk or even higher. Head is saying no but we both like the place ......
Does it have flood mitigation built in?
As mentioned above, high up electrics, hard flooring, flood gates, etc.
If so, head wins.
If not, do your homework; ask the neighbours, hire centres (dehumidifiers), local papers, etc and take your time. Ignore your hearts and ask yourself whether you'll find a builder to put things right when everyone needs a builder 🙂
Medium risk is a bit too rich for my taste
TJ might think he's sitting pretty but when the ground floor is abandoned things might get problematic.
You can't open sluice gates if the sea level plus high tide plus storm surge plus big waves make it impossible. Unlikely for sure
Yes - so we have a couple of hours to wait so the river might rise a couple of inches. Its a huge area ( many acres) that is held at high tide so even with the river in full flood its just not possible for it to rise the 1m+ to overspill the river banks. During a massive upstream flooding event the river outside my building didn't rise noticeably simply because the amount of water that can possibly come down the river is not enough to significantly raise the levels in the huge area held at high tide in the couple of hours that the sluice could not be opened.
Why would the ground floor be abandoned?
I've got in-laws who live in a red flood zone, but had been told it had never flooded*.
They are next to the river flood wall, big sump and electric pump, and have a large underground drain next to them to fire the town and hill water into sump - pump - river.
The council and Scottish water had not cleaned leaves out the system for years. So when the 'once in a hundred years' rain came one morning (only 10 years after the last 'once in a hundred years' event) the sump clogged, the pump tripped, the river backed up due to the high tide downstream and flood water combining, and so the big pipe back to town, thier own drains/sewerage, and the surface water all flowed into thier house. They were knee deep.
The house has to be insured by flood-re, it's basically unsellable as everyone locally knows what happened, and they live in fear of the pump not working again...
*It had flooded properly, 10years and 1 month before they bought. So the solicitor questionnaire to the vendor 'has your house flooded in the last 10 years?' was filled in as 'no'.
In our current changing climate I would NEVER buy in any flood risk area.
TJ - you should have a look at what the Grangemouth Flood Defence scheme is planning on mitigating. Their scheme is based on a 1:200 event at ~2-2.5m surge in the Forth.
As for fluvial flooding risk, I wouldn’t be buying a property with one: climate change has already arrived here in that the new normal is more intense rainfall events leading to more localised flash flooding.
TJ, I have no idea on the specifics of your building, it was more a comment on an oddity with who is responsible for this in Scotland.
The responsibility for managing flood defences sits with the local authority, they take guidance from SEPA on water levels, but the ultimate responsibility to close gates etc lies with the local authority. Councils are so cash strapped that they have clubbed together and run centralised emergency call centres, you phone in the middle of the night to report a river level higher than expected and ask for a gate to be closed and there is nobody with the expertise available to make that call. That Perth example I posted was exactly that.
I believe more of these powers still sit with the environment agency in England, a centralised body able to employ experts - it will never catch on.
TJ - you should have a look at what the Grangemouth Flood Defence scheme is planning on mitigating. Their scheme is based on a 1:200 event at ~2-2.5m surge in the Forth.
that level of sea rise wouldn't cause flooding for me
It was just a general point about how realistic the flood risk is. For me personally despite being mapped as a flood risk its close to zero as the mechanics of it all make it very very unlikely to flood and even if it is my liability would be low. half a mile upstream the risk is real
TJ - the guys who produce the flood maps are serious people doing a difficult job. If they say there is a risk, it's been thoroughly thought through and isn't some back of envelope calculation. There will be a risk if it's on the map. We're awful at understanding risk and the communication of it is rarely clear. If there was a 15% chance of showers you probably wouldn't take an umbrella with you to the pub but that doesn't mean that it will definitely not rain.
Low risk is not the same as zero risk. The consequences of a flood are not to be underestimated, whatever the source of water.
Coastal flooding, aka Storm Surge, is very, very damaging. If you get the right combination of tides, low pressure and direction it can be utterly catastrophic. The 1953 North Sea surge event was horrific across the UK and Netherlands.
Concentrations of population and industry in West Central belt are somewhat protected by the islands but not zero risk. The east coast is certainly less protected. I wouldn't live below 15m elevation on the east coast unless it was on top of cliffs
There is also a underlying issue of what a 1 in 100 year event looked like and how it was calculated. It's a statistical representation of risk based on a calculation using various layers of input data. The event could happen at any point in theory.
If it was calculated in the 80s and flood defence construction started in the 90s then that was assuming a stationarity of climate (ie not really changing, so no climate change driven sea level rise). We know that things have changed a fair bit since then. The 1 in 100 could now be a 1 in 70 yr event thus statistically more frequent.
I am sure they are - but its a clear error to state my flat is in a high risk flood zone. dunno whos error mind you and I can see why its happened as there is a high flood risk not far upstream. I suspect its the insurance companies being over cautious rather than the flood risk guys
all it was was a comment to say how realistic is the risk. for me its highly unrealistic as the artificially high river level outside my flat cannot rise sufficiently to over top the walls across the whole large docklands with the amount of water that can come down the river in the time the sluice cannot be opened and because I am behind the docks a surge in the forth would have to be many metres and flood a huge area before it got to my building
IIRC it wasn't for storm surge anyway but for river flow. I shall go and see what further info I can dig up
I just checked the SEPA map. Low risk into the courtyard behind my building. Nothing to my front door. Medium risk area close to my building MY building is actually a little higher than the surrounding buildings. High risk area not far away
As I suspected its probably the insurance companies not looking at the data in high enough resolution
Early days yet but we're starting to think of a move to Herefordshire and flood risk is featuring in our consideration of where we might consider moving to. For us, we would not consider anything risky and would want to pay due diligence to this aspect.
As I suspected its probably the insurance companies not looking at the data in high enough resolution
This is simply not true for most insurance companies. They look at flood risk very carefully as it is a very common source of high value claims and they need to be aware of all the risks per property. They have to demonstrate to the regulator that they have a holistic view of all risks for all properties that they insure. The is vital so that the industry doesn't collapse the next time there is a huge storm like the Burns Day windstorm in 1990.
At the initial stage of underwriting they use the published flood maps to do an initial assessment of risk, they do have access to more sophisticated modelling if they choose to use it. Increased resolution is not necessarily a good indicator of the quality of the flood maps. Don't be fooled by that, it is much more complex. (That's like saying a car with more BHP is always faster). There are so many factors to take into account but it's too complex to distill into 2 sentences.
One problem you face as a consumer is that we all look for cheap insurance using an aggregator website like compare the market or confused. They use pre-calculated risk metrics per location so the nuance of your house at a higher elevation can be lost to the system. You could get a GPS certificate for your property and then phone an insurance broker and have a grown up conversation with them about the relative risk. But that costs more and takes more time which is the very thing consumers don't want to do
Or I can simply self insure for a risk that for me is both very low incidence and very low severity ( I don't have any liability to pay for damage caused by water penetration unless it reaches 30 m and only a tiny liability for damage to the exterior of the building.
One problem you face as a consumer is that we all look for cheap insurance using an aggregator website like compare the market or confused.
I actually went to a specialist broker
Thanks for the shout @joshvegas, I'm certainly not as clever as some peeps on this forum, but I'll take the complement!
I should state I actually work for the EA for the team that does the flood mapping in this area (Wessex). We are working hard to improve our flood maps in some locations, so the risk rating in the area around the property you are interested in may change in the near future. I also have to emphasise this information tells you the flood risk of the land around a building, not the building itself. Cheddar is in a rapid response catchment meaning it's flashy. If there were a river flood you may get an hour or less warning, although it's usually very apparent from the rainfall. There are also be surface water and groundwater risks in Cheddar, due to the Mendips geology and steepness.
As you've said there is an element of personal risk tolerance and how you would or could deal with a flood if it happened - financial and personal resiliency. Already mentioned Flood Re guarantees a flood insurance will be possible if the property was built before 2009, though it does not guarantee what it might cost. Clearly I don't work for the insurance industry, but we get a lot of insurance related enquiries. Purely anecdotally and not officially, I think we are getting more enquiries where insurance premiums have gone up where the risk band or category hasn't. Insurance companies might use their own models and also underwriters will be evaluating the different risks across their portfolio, so it may be that some underwriters are increasing premiums for those at specific risks like flooding more than the general uplift applied across everyone's premiums. Also yes climate change means rarer bigger events will happen more regularly. OP may be best calling a few insurers to see what their premiums would look like to get an idea of insurers' (or their underwriters') assessment of the likelihood.
As you've said there is an element of personal risk tolerance and how you would or could deal with a flood if it happened - financial and personal resiliency
This is key. Not just now, but in 10-20 years time, when you are older and potentially more infirm.
The house i was brought up in in the Fens flooded in 53, literally across the road from the river. New channels were cut and it never flooded in the 50 years since, but I persuaded my parents to move in the early noughties. In the last few years that street has been subject to red flood warnings a few times now, although not flooded yet.
The house i was brought up in in the Fens flooded in 53, literally across the road from the river. New channels were cut and it never flooded in the 50 years since, but I persuaded my parents to move in the early noughties. In the last few years that street has been subject to red flood warnings a few times now, although not flooded yet.
Deeping?
We live in DSJ near the river Welland, but not right on top of it. It sometimes gets bloody high and it seems to happen more frequently now than when I moved in. I am not sure whether this is because of genuine water level rises or how they are controlling the flow of water in the whole system.
A few years ago I left work early after seeing some images on FB of how high the river was getting. I was thinking that we'd probably need to take as many electricals etc. upstairs to mitigate the damage if it did flood. Luckily, it didn't flood.
Personally, I would not like to move anywhere with a flood risk. I have discussed with my Wife about whether we should move to a higher area than where we are. I feel that in years to come, if we can afford it we would be sensible to move.
Through the winter, I do have pangs of worry every time there is a big storm forecast with days of persistent rain.
We used to live in a higher flood risk area. We came close to flooding on 2 occasions in the 4 years we lived there. We now live half way up a hill with a much lower risk of flooding. I wouldn't go any where near a house that was in medium risk area.