Preparedness for when

pineapple

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

Pineapple (or anyone else that knows the answer...)

Re houses that its not possible to get flood insurance on - can they still get the rest of their household insurance (ie against fire/theft/accidental damage/legal expenses cover/etc)?

I argued the toss wiith the buildings insurers. None of the neighbours who have lived here all their lives have ever known this locality flood. In the end they agreed I could have the normal insurance but without the flood cover. Having argued that it would never happen I could hardly object. No other insurance affected.

pineapple

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

How does it make life easier, to have a stranger search your home :huh:

Well in theory once they are satisfied any harrassment should cease until the next round in a couple of years. That's how some people (not me) rationalise it.

greenbee

pineapple wrote: »

I argued the toss wiith the buildings insurers. None of the neighbours who have lived here all their lives have ever known this locality flood. In the end they agreed I could have the normal insurance but without the flood cover. Having argued that it would never happen I could hardly object. No other insurance affected.

I had problems when I moved here - this house has never flooded, or any of the immediate neighbours (at least, not within living memory, but they're not that old!). I discovered that some insurers go by the first 4 digits of your post code, some by more. The ones that I ended up with use mapping data and the databases that you use when doing flood searches for the house purchase, which put this particular plot at low risk.

Mind you, my uncle, who is a civil engineer specialising in flooding, told me not to worry, because if my house flooded, the town downstream would be underwater. Not long after I moved in the Royal Engineers were flooding farmland to prevent exactly that happening - and getting into the town from this side was almost impossible!

GreyQueen

:eek: Blimey, first four digits of your post code in a lot of places I know is a post town covering an area of about 15 x 15 miles, with a huge variety of topography and therefore flood risk. You'd get a poor result of flood risk assessment using such a method.

My home (and whole neighbourhood up to about 300 m from the river) is at moderate risk of severe flooding, according to the Environment Agency's website. Which is always good to know.;)

greenbee

I know, it's crazy - for some insurers the whole village (and beyond) is the same risk level regardless of distance from the river. And the EA website ... Just because the insurer happens to know that a property (or possibly more) has flooded here in the past.

moneyistooshorttomention

You'd think it would be easy enough for these insurers to get out some Ordnance Survey maps and check out the height of land. I'd a darn sight sooner buy a house 20' from the nearest watercourse (but halfway up a hill) than one 2000' (if there is such a thing in Britain:cool:) but the ground ran completely level from the river to that house.

Time for a bit of commonsense to be applied.

....and, of course, there is no accounting for the Idiot Factor (eg stupid workmen or house-owners that do something stupid that will block the drains and that is then followed by the relevant Authorities not doing their job and clearing the drains out, so that the Idiots don't cause surface water from their actions to flood other peoples property).

GreyQueen

greenbee wrote: »

I know, it's crazy - for some insurers the whole village (and beyond) is the same risk level regardless of distance from the river. And the EA website ... Just because the insurer happens to know that a property (or possibly more) has flooded here in the past.

I was just remembering that the first four digits of my parents' postcode belong to a post town 44 miles away in a different county. Parental home is above the 100 ft countour and three-quarters of a mile away from (and well above) the nearest watercourse, which is a tiny stream feeding a small river.

Whereas the post town is on a big river. Nothing going on in the post town has the slightest relevence to my parents' flood risk and, if their home were to flood by anything more than a burst water main, a big chunk of suvvern ingerland would be awash.:rotfl:

thriftwizard

We are about 200 yards from the confluence of one of our county's two big rivers with one of its bigger tributaries. We also have trees within 30 feet of the house; we'd have no privacy if we didn't. But eventually we found an insurer who recognised that as there have been both buildings and trees here since medieval times, our risk is actually quite low. That said, the building trots up & down with the water table, so cracks & creaks are a bit of a feature, but it's stood for 110+ years so it's not going to come down in a hurry!

Worryingly, though, they have built entire estates nearby on a piece of land that's well-known for flooding, trusting to our new, as-yet-untested flood defences and a bund. Which could well raise premiums for all of us when the inevitable does happen...

GreyQueen

They've put a 3 ft bund between the new executive estate (how I detest that phrase) and one of the two rivers which meet in my hometown. I've walked the riverbank on the other side of it from the houses and thought I wouldn't want to bet that it'd hold back a riverine flood.

Thinking about it logically, the hometown has been a town since well before the Norman Conquest and this site is only a few hundred yards from the historic centre. No one, in the past 1300 years has built on it.

That should be enough to tell you it's a bad idea. And the same situation is occurring all over the country.:(

thriftwizard

They've abandoned the last tranch of housing on the new, 260 residences plus, estate where the old factory was, down by the river. They put in pumps to "drain" the site last autumn, when water was literally fountaining out of the foundation trenches. The pumps are still running 24/7, and the water still fountains out when it rains, although they have managed to get rid of all the waterfowl that had set up home in the small lake that had developed. You wouldn't get me, or anyone with local knowledge, to pay half a million pounds for a waterside executive townhouse down there...