disaster – Dan Q

“You saved my life!” (or: how my kids briefly thought I was a superhero)

This weekend, my friend Liz arranged for some other Abnibbers and I to gather, with our families, for a camping/glamping weekend East of Oxford.

Here’s a story of something that transpired there, presented in three parts:

The fire
The battery pack
“You saved my life!”

Adults and children mill around a firepit, some of them holding marshmallows on skewers. — The campsite provided our large group with an entire field to ourselves, including spaces for socialising, a fire pit (at which the kids enjoyed toasting marshmallows), and a wood-fired hot tub.

The entire weekend would have surely been a memorable experience already, but one particular event will probably stick in the minds of everybody in attendance: the fire.

The fire

The UK’s in its unprecedented third heatwave of the year: the grass is all dying and everything is tinder dry. And so it was that, on Friday night as the kids and I slept in our glamping “dome”, I was woken by the distant beep-beep-beep of a domestic smoke alarm. A few seconds later, I heard a second such alarm with a different tone, and it became clear that this wasn’t just somebody’s toast on fire.

Not recorded: the sound of the occupant of this static caravan/cabin – having jumped through the window to safety as the front door was blocked by flames – on the phone to the fire brigade.

I went back into the dome to check on the children, which is when Penny knocked on my door to ensure I was aware of what was going on. The kids were sound asleep, so I ran out to the car park to move the car (which was parked in such a position that embers were raining down on it!) and to check on the situation.

I returned to the dome and got the children dressed. We evacuated to a safer distance and watched as the firefighters arrived and began to tackle the blaze. Short of water, they had one pump dousing the flaming building while two others relayed water from the nearest fire hydrant, way down the hill.

Eventually the situation came under control and we were all able to return to bed.

The battery pack

I spoke to Mike, whose holiday home was the building that was destroyed. He’d managed to escape with some shorts and his mobile phone, but little else: in particular, his car keys remained inside and were probably destroyed, which rendered him unable to drive back to his regular home.

A group of adults and older children stand out in a field at night, while in the distance thick smoke is illuminated by flashing blue lights. — The firefighters worked quickly, but it still took over three hours before they were able to finish spreading out and drenching everything that had caught light. We watched from a distance, and sheltered all the children (including those of a non-Abnib family on-site) in one of our tents.

Mike had been turning his phone on only in bursts in order to conserve battery for all of the essential calls he’d have to make (e.g. his bank, to extract some money without his cards, and a locksmith, to get him back into his car). His phone charger – an awkward USB-B-Micro one – hadn’t survived the fire.

But conveniently… I happened to have such a cable in my bag. Plus a fully-charged battery pack. So I lent both to Mike, in the hope that it’d make it easier for him to do all of the necessary administration¹.

A handful of metal frame struts stick out from an ash pile that was clearly once a static caravan. — It’s got to be a pretty-devastating thing to happen to your holiday home and everything in it. Mike was surprisingly chill about it when I spoke to him, taking soft-of an attitude of “well, there’s no point fretting about it after the fact!”

“You saved my life!”

Anyway: on Saturday night, shortly after the kids and I had turned-in, there was a knock on the door. It was Mike, come to return the battery pack I’d lent him.

The kids didn’t know who he was, so I explained: “This is Mike; he’s the fella who lived in the home that burned down last night.”

Mike handed over the battery pack and charging cable and, grateful for them, used a metaphor that. “Thanks,” he said, passing the hardware to me, “You saved my life!”

Several beds laid-out in a darkened glamping pod. — I hadn’t told Mike which glamping pod was ours, and just figured I’d see him around. Or else if I didn’t get my battery pack back, that’d be fine: it’ll have been more-useful to him than to me in the days to come! But there we were, in our pyjamas, when he appeared at our door.

He turned and left, and both kids sprung out of bed and exclaimed “You saved the life of the guy whose house burned down‽”

I’m sure they had in their minds the idea that, during the period between the fire starting and me waking and evacuating them, I’d singlehandedly dragged this dude out of a burning building. Y’know, instead of just lending him a phone charger after-the-fact.

I only let them hold the misapprehension for a few minutes, but for a moment it lightened the mood.

Footnotes

¹ I was already using my phone to call our insurance company before our flood, earlier this year, had finished. I can only imagine how inconvenient it is to suffer a disaster and lose your communications lifeline at the same time!

Can’t sleep, too much fire

An unexpected start to the kids’ and I’s glamping weekend last night when the static caravan behind our dome burned to the ground. We spent most of our night half way down a field watching the fire crews tackle the blaze.

(Nobody was injured; the residents were able to escape out of a window.)

Chicory House, Real Coffee, Flooded Keyboard

As if I hadn’t suffered enough “flood damage” this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup – hour the first time in months! – in our rental… by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱

6-12 Months

The insurance loss adjusters came around this morning, accompanied by damage assessors and electricians and whatnot.

The process continues to feel painfully slow. We’re still one to two weeks from confirmation that the insurance company will accept liability and be ready to start paying for, y’know, the immediate concerns like where we’re going to live.

“How long should we plan on renting another house to live in?” I asked, warily.

“Six to twelve months?” guessed the loss adjusters.

Erk! 😭

F-Day plus 3

It feels inconceivable to me that we’re only at F-Day plus three; that is, three days since a flash flood rushed through the ground floor of our house and forced us to evacuate. We’ve been able to visit since and start assessing the damage, but for now I figured that what you’d want would be the kinds of horrible pictures that make you say “wow; I’m glad that didn’t happen to me”.

These pictures are all from F-Day itself (which happened to be Friday the 13th; delightful, eh?):

A particularly horrifying moment was when the seals on the patio doors gave way and the dining room began to flood, and we had to pivot to laying sandbags to protect the kitchen from the dining room rather than to protect the house as a whole. (Eventually, every ground floor room would be affected.)

We’ve had a few nights in Premier Inns, but it’s a new week and it’s time to hassle the insurance company to come and have a look around. And then, maybe, we can start working out where we’ll live so the repair work can start.

Ugh.

Normal life

I want normal life back now, please.

I appreciate that it’s only 40-ish hours since my house flooded and we had to move out. But with all the stress and activity that’s necessarily followed, it feels like it’s been so much longer.

Unrelated note: why has the person in the room above me at this hotel been using a pogo stick since around 05:30?

The calm after the storm

This morning, from my Premier Inn window, the skies are clear. I could almost forget that, just 4 miles away, my house is full of water.

Today may well be a day of waders and damage assessment, conversations with insurance companies and of working out where we’ll be living for the near future.

But strangely, what’s thrown me first this morning was that I couldn’t make this post submit.

Turns out my crosspost-to-mastodon checkbox was checked. Because my Mastodon server… runs on my homelab. Which is currently unplugged and in one of the highest rooms of a house with no electricity or Internet access. (Or, probably, running water… although that matters less to a homelab.)

I think I moved it before it got wet, but yesterday is such a blur that I just don’t know. I remember we spent some time fighting back the water with sandbags and barricades. I remember the moments each room began to fail, one by one, and we started moving whatever we could carry to higher floors (max props to folks from Eynsham Fire Bridade for helping with the heavy stuff). But if you ask me what order we rescued things in, I just don’t know.

I guess we’ll find out when the waters recede, and it’s safe to go check.

Fucking hell.

Flood

My house is under water.

Well, fuck.

Hurricane Milton

From safely outside of its predicted path, just around the Yucatan coast, Hurricane Milton seems like a forboding and distant monster. A growing threat whose path will thankfully take it away, not towards, me.

My heart goes out to the people on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico who find themselves along the route of this awakened beast.

Grenfell Tower: The fires that foretold the tragedy

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

On 14 June 2017, televisions across the country showed a west London tower block burn. For some, this was history repeating itself – as if five similar fires had simply not been important enough to prevent the deaths of 72 people in Grenfell Tower.

Catherine Hickman was on the phone when she died. It wasn’t a panicked call or an attempt to have some last words with a loved one.

As a BBC Two documentary recounts, she had been speaking to a 999 operator for 40 minutes, remaining calm and following the advice to “stay put” in her tower block flat.

As smoke surrounded her, she stayed put. As flames came through the floorboards, she stayed put. At 16:30, she told the operator: “It’s orange, it’s orange everywhere” before saying she was “getting really hot in here”.

Believing to the last that she was in the safest place, she carried on talking to the operator – until she stopped.

“Hello Catherine.

“Hello Catherine. Can you make any noise so I know that you’re listening to me?

“Catherine, can you make any noise?

“Can you bang your phone or anything?

“Catherine, are you there?

“I think that’s the phone gone [CALL ENDS]“

Miss Hickman was not a resident of Grenfell Tower. The fire in which she and five others died happened in July 2009, at 12-storey Lakanal House in Camberwell, south London. But that same “stay put” advice was given to Grenfell residents eight years later. Many of those who did never made it out alive.

…

BBC News

Excellently-written, chilling article about a series of tower block fires which foreshadow Grenfell: similar mistakes, similar tragedies. This promotes an upcoming BBC television programme broadcasting this evening; might be worth a look.

Ghost town 13. Night ride through the dead zone

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Elena Filatova

If you’ve not come across her before: Elena Filatova is a Ukranian woman who periodically motorcycles through the Chernobyl exclusion zone, recording her progress and filming/photographing what she sees on her adventures. I bought her photobook the other year and I’ve particularly enjoyed her videos ever since. Worth a look.

Oxford Under Water

Parts of Oxford have been flooded for the last few days, and apparently the worst is yet to come. I worked from home yesterday, intimidated by the available choices of traversing flooded roads or else taking the hilly 3+ mile diversion around the problem areas, but today: I decided that it was time to man up and cycle in to the office.

Kennington Road underwater. — Here’s where I forded Kennington Road. Yes, I just used the word “forded” to describe crossing the road.

Conveniently, we’ve somewhere along the way acquired a large pair of Wellington boots (we think they might have been Paul‘s, but as he’s now left Oxford without them, they’ve been sitting in our charity-shop-box). So I booted up and set out. I was yawning all the way:

Police direct traffic away from a waterlogged Abingdon Road.

I had to weave my way back and forth around the cyclepaths nearest my house, and – on a couple of ocassions – get off the bike and wade it through: I’d considered riding through some of the larger puddles – my mean pedal-ground clearance is about as high as the top of my boots, anyway – until I met a soaked cyclist coming the other way: he’d become disbalanced going over a submarine kerbstone and fallen into the freezing water. Seeing that quickly made me choose the safer strategy!

Flood defences erected near Hinksey Lake. — Near Hinksey Lake, serious flood defences have been hastily erected and pumping operations are underway to clear gardens and footpaths.

Alongside the lake was one of the most flood-damaged areas, but heavy barriers had been erected and pumping engines were working at returning the water to the “right” side of them. The lake bridge was completely closed off: it looked like it might be traversable, but if the water gets any higher, it won’t be.

In Hinksey Park, the playing fields and cycle path are completely underwater.

I took the cycle route through Hinksey Park in order to avoid the flooded parts of Abingdon Road, which runs parallel, but I’m not sure that it was much better. In the photo above, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’re looking at the lake… but in actual fact, the lake is behind me: that’s the playing fields. You can just about make out the line down the middle of the cycle path, through the murky water.

Flooded garden and driveway. — Between Hinksey Lake and the Thames there are flooded driveways and gardens. The sign on the gate reads “No parking. Keep entrance clear at all times.”, in case anybody was thinking of parking in this waist-deep water.

Pressing on, I came to the Thames Path, which my route typically follows for a short distance to the footbridge into the city centre. And that’s when I realised quite how high the river really is.

To the right of the bush - the river. To the left - the footpath. You'd be forgiven if you can't tell the difference. — To the right of the bush – the river. To the left – the footpath. You’d be forgiven if you can’t tell the difference.

By the time I found myself on a footpath with a current, I realised that my route might need a little bit of a rethink. With the bridge I was aiming for just ahead, though, I was able to double-back and cut through an alleyway (between some seriously at-risk houses), duck under a couple of “footpath closed” barriers, and splash out to the bridgehead.

By the time I was on the higher, better-reinforced East bank for the river, things began to improve, and within a few minutes I was right in the city centre. There, you wouldn’t know that, only a short distance away, a significant number of streets were underwater. To sit in the dry, on Broad Street, in the middle of Oxford, it seems strange to think that on the edge of town, people are being evacuated from their homes.

Water

My house is full of it. This isn’t good.

Much thanks to Welsh Water, where a friendly man talked me through the quirks in my stop tap (who’d have thought that it would be so hard to turn a tap off and drain a system). Now I suppose I ought to start mopping. Then I suppose I ought to find out what’s burst, and why.

Alongside all of this, I need to work out how to stop my washing machine from being so confused and let me have my bedsheets back. I don’t think the engineers that programmed it ever thought of the possibility that the water supply might be interrupted mid-cycle.

It’s going to be a long night.