It’s been pretty wet the past few days in England. Not a shock, admittedly, but this is pretty scary.
The entire ground under a block of flats just disappeared into a big crater after a culverted stream collapsed. I’m actually quite impressed by the foundations as the building still seems to be standing, last I heard…
Bloody hell, that’s like a picture from a disaster movie. Bet their insurance companies are trying to get out of responsibility too.
I suspect that there will be a massive argument between insurance companies, between the householders’, architects’, surveyors’, builders’, engineers’ and the developers’ insurance. Might take a while to sort out too, which isn’t great for those poor people, but there’s certainly some blame to be apportioned there. I guess that is why the Duke is acting the way he is, he doesn’t want to admit liability.
Those poor people is what I should be thinking after reading that article.
What I’m actually thinking is Toe Rag, what a great insult I’ll have to find an occasion to use that.
I am a terrible person. (but not quite a toe rag I hope)
I’d say the builders did pretty well if the whole town around them collapsed and they stayed together.
Which profession is responsible for making sure buildings aren’t built on quicksand?
Also, to be fair, the situation as of the writing of that report was still so unstable and (if you’ll pardon the expression) fluid that there was no way for engineers to get in to properly assess the damage and what the causes may have been.
Quite frankly, the rainfall here this year has been so extraordinary (I think this is the third “once a century” rainstorm we’ve had since June) that I wouldn’t be surprised if there was nobody to blame in this case –nature can always dish out more than any man-made structure can be expected to deal with.
Have you people learned nothing from America? It’s always somebody’s fault – the rich fucks who own the property. Our lawyers have taught us well. 
Did anyone else read the title of the OP as “Floods eat flocks of bats”? No? Just me, then.
I was just talking to my retired architect father about this, and he reckons it’ll be ruled ‘act of god’ and the insurance companies will come to an arrangement. Basically, his opinion (based on the news items he has seen, which obviously don’t tell the full story yet) is that the circumstances are likely to have been so extraordinary there could be no blame to assign, everyone may have done their job correctly but the weather events of this year were pretty much unforeseeable. But he was fairly certain that the people would get insurance compensation.
So pretty much agreeing with you.
In America, flood insurance is not included in a generic homeowners policy. It’s a separate coverage or “rider.” This is because the amount you need to pay for flood coverage varies *wildly *based on your home’s proximity to a body of water and local geography, which can’t be accounted for by zip codes on an actuarial table. For example, I grew up next to a lake that flooded to some degree on an annual basis. We didn’t have flood insurance, because our house was up on a hill and my mom didn’t think we needed it (FWIW, we never did). But if we’d *had *a flood policy, it would have been significantly cheaper for us than for the homes right on the lake.
I’m not sure whether any of this would apply in the UK. I’m not even sure if the flats are owned by the people living in them, or by a property management company. But I think it’s an important distinction to make: just because a flood is an act of god doesn’t mean insurance will cover it.
The start of the problem in this case was actually back in May when the culvert first collapsed, causing a hole to open in the street nearby. That then caused flooding in June, since when the stream has been diverted by pumps and giant hoses (you can see some of them in the aerial footage). In fact Google’s aerial imagery shows that hole and,if you look to the west youc an see all the pipes they put in. This week’s rain overwhelmed the temporary fix in a big way…
Basically all this land is (or was!) fill over what was originally quite a deep valley. The culvert was 12 metres below the surface so when it gave way a whole lot of earth got washed away.