HEINE: ‘You just see your whole life floating out of the front door’

We can all suffer from this. It can strike anywhere, suddenly. So what does it feel like to stand in a t-shirt, jeans and bare feet with a wife and three small children in front of your house heaving with water three feet deep?

 Kara Hayes amidst the devastation. 

The big questions remain: how and why did it happen…twice? How can Thames Water reassure the residents it won’t happen again? What is the current condition of this water main? Why will the investigation into the cause of the flood take six weeks? But the small details of everyday life after this kind of flood paint a powerful picture.

This is not everyone’s story, it is the saga of one family. Brett and Kara Hayes with their three children, Lola, eight, Alfie, seven and Tom, two, was one of the hardest hit families.

The children asked “Where we gonna live now, mummy?” and for one week all that two-year-old Tom could say was “Daddy’s car’s washed away. My bike’s washed away.” He was probably suffering from shock.

Brett told me “The whole thing is difficult to describe. It’s like numbness, followed by instant panic. You see your whole life floating out the front door.”

On Tuesday, exactly two weeks after the disaster on September 23 I visited the Hayes’ home with Brett expecting the clean-up operation to be almost finished. It had almost begun. The scene that greeted me was one of devastation. A stench and the smell of cold dampness immediately burst from the house when Brett unlocked the door.

The kitchen

The Hayes’ two bedroom house has four rooms and a toilet. The kitchen still contained what could be called the corpses of their new washing machine, dryer, cooker and fridge-freezer. The freezer was underneath the fridge and immediately after the flood was full of brown, dirty, sandy water. Now the water has seeped away leaving a film of dirty sand over the once frozen meat and fish. Since the electricity has been cut off the contents are putrid.

The fridge was high enough to escape flood damage, but after two weeks all the food is spoiled. The family had a food delivery the night before the water main burst with an extra-large amount because their son Alfie was having a seventh birthday party on September 27.

The fridge was full of party food – sausages, chips, peas, sweetcorn, prawns, chicken nuggets and a birthday cake. It is all still there, ruined, a sign of how time stopped and is standing in freeze frame two weeks after the disaster.

The sitting room is the only area half-way cleared.

Brett explained that the sofa was dumped in a skip. “It was delivered on last Christmas Eve, ten months ago, cream coloured and comfortable. The water came up three feet and turned it into something muddy and dirty, damp and disgusting.”

Two black bin bags of ruined DVDs sit on the floor, a soggy reminder of good times shared in the family.

Other reminders are standing upright on a table to dry out – two books, one of his marriage and the other of his children. The books are slowly disintegrating. Pages stick together.

Brett opens it: “We took pictures of our first child, Lola, as a new born babe and they show the step-by-step progress she made.” Now he can’t turn the pages. He’s angry. I’m surprised he doesn’t throw it down on the table, but gently, with hope he puts it back standing up to dry out.

The toilet area is still, after two weeks, inexcusable. I won’t even try to describe it.

In the children’s room the beds remain wet. Brett rolled up the mattress and it was soaked. All his children’s school books and education material are flaking on the floor. Lola likes to read, so her parents bought their eight year old a complete set of Enid Blyton. It has now turned to putty.

Brett lifted Tom’s bed and all his teddy bears which were on top of the bed have been carried by the flood water under it. They’re huddled together, joined by mould. Alfie’s birthday party bags are soaking on the carpet.

“The smell is terrible,” says Brett. “All of the house is completely contaminated. I feel empty. It’s hard to get over the smell and the damp, especially two weeks after it happened.”

Brett and Kara’s bedroom is complete chaos. Drawers have been sucked out of cabinets. The bed is askew and standing in the centre, a ruined altar to some sinister force. All the portraits of the children, also ruined, are spread out on the bed.

Brett and Kara’s honeymoon pictures are stuck together. They went to Cancun in Mexico and swam with dolphins. Now they can’t open this packet of pictures welded together by water. Brett had the wedding photos ‘backed up’ by copies on two computers, but the computers were water logged and are in the skip. It’s all gone.

I asked Brett how he felt about this tragedy. “I have every feeling except happiness. I feel let down, angry, disgusted and betrayed.

He salvaged a slightly dry “Elmo” doll for his two-year-old. As we left, he locked the door on a part of his life that is lost, it was like sealing a tomb. His family’s life went down the plug hole with the flood: with the clean-up it fell through the cracks. Who’s responsible?