Taken At The Flood

Water water everywhere, but I wouldn't recommend you drink it!!!!!
We were unfortunately caught up in the regions floods on Monday afternoon. My wife has lived in the area for over 20 years and has never known our area of Hull flood. Some of the scenes are devastating, and I really feel for the other residents of Hull who have also been hit.
We ourselves were not hit bad, compared to some people who have had and still have 10 inches of water in their homes. Our kitchen ended up flooded with an inch of water, fortunately our kitchen is lower than the rest of our house, so nothing else was damaged and all our possessions are safe. I have never experienced flooding before, so found this very difficult to cope with, having nothing to draw from. Firstly, I phoned Floodline as advised who were very unhelpful and informed me that they only deal with floods caused by rivers or seas, and told me to ring the council (this filled me with dread living in Hull, I have already written blogs about Hull City Council's incompetancies). Unsurprisingly I couldn't get through to the council to begin with, so called the fire brigade, I did feel bad about this knowing that other people were worse off, but this doesn't help when you are watching water rising through your kitchen floor! I was asked by the woman at the emergency services if it was a matter of life or death, and when I said "no" was told to ring the council - I only wanted some advice! I eventually got a ringing tone from the council and sat in a queue for 45 minutes. The guy that I spoke to offered me a water pump, which I explained wouldn't work with the small amount of water that we had. He then advised that I move my possessions upstairs to which I explained were not in danger; as I say our kitchen is a foot lower than the rest of the house and we only had an inch of water. He seemed to ignore this and told me to move everything, go upstairs and put together an "emergency pack". None of this was terribly helpful considering things hadn't got anywhere near that bad and didn't look likely to get that bad. I did try and explain this to him, but it must be very difficult to use his initiative and offer advice that wasn't written on the card in front of him! I was then basically told that all I could do was sit and watch! Which is fine, but not really what you want to hear. But I guess my gripe here is that not one of the people that I spoke to offered any sort of sympathy or understanding. The guy at the council then told me to, "have a good day", the bloody gall of it!!!!!!! It's politeness gone mad!!!!!!!!
Before the water came into the house, I had tried a vain attempt to bail some water from our back garden to try and stop the kitchen flooding, but didn't have anywhere to put it. So, where did I put it?! The bath!!!! So my wife and I spent a glorious day yesterday wading around in the water, unable to bathe or flush our toilet. Suffice to say, whilst standing in the water and filling bowls and buckets with water, drenched from head to toe, I did not spend any time thinking about what was IN the water!