How will you feel when....

I do not live near a river, only a few little streams pass through our village. When we bought the house 20 years ago it never occurred to us to think of checking flood risk. The EA maps were not available and the worries in the early/mid 1990s were drought not floods. We did later discovered it flooded in 1947, and where didn't flood then, and before that in 1895, so not prone to flooding, just every 50 years or so.

The village flooded in 2007, and about 40 houses were affected, although not ours, we all shrugged it off as the 50 year flood in line with the previous ones, but it flooded last week, although, thankfully only 5 - 10 houses were affected. The EA maps show our house is not liable to flood either from ground water or one of the village streams overflowing.

However this hasn't stopped the insurers putting us in the 'at risk' group and we only have flood cover if we remain with our current insurer, if we leave no other insurer will give us flood cover. The result is that over the last 5 years our insurance premium has almost doubled, because we are a captive market. We are seriously thinking of moving to another insurer and dropping the flood cover. After all we are not actually in the flood zone.

I'd feel okay if it went down following the years when there were no floods, gales, heavy snow falls or other major disasters.

Our insurance is astronomical because we live in a high flood risk area between two rivers. The 1000 acres of farmland around us didn't even flood in 1947 or 1953 but our postcode says it floods!!!!!

I'll feel better than I did when my insurance went up because I live in the adjacent postcode to the most burgalled area in England.

Yes, Ariadne, should have qualified it. The EA maps have been available for at least 8 years, and talk about climate change for a lot longer. Anyone who bought a house down by a river in the last 15 years is pretty inconsiderate and careless.
What surprised me when the cameras were in Marlow, etc., was the number of properties that still had boats tied up outside them. Second homes, do you think. I think if I had a motor boat and my house was in danger of flooding, the first thing I would do was load up the boat to get away if necessary.

Same as I'll feel when the price of meat, milk, vegetables, bread and everything else goes up due to the flooding. Fed up and hard up!

Not sure how I feel about the insurance, though I understand your point, ^durhamjen*; the Sat Nav in Theseus' car has a section in which you can check height above sea level. He generally fiddles with it when he's getting bored. However, when we were looking for houses down here (North Devon) there were one or two, very near the sea, that seemed to be not a sensible buy! So yes, common sense is a factor.

However there are people in the flooded areas who have been there for generations. There was one elderly man in "The Times" this week, whose family have farmed on the Somerset Levels since the 16th century, and he was scathing about incomers who complained about flooding. There were the "Somerset islands" where the original inhabitants set up homes and farms, on slightly high ground, and weathered the floods. What about them?

agreed mollie

Resigned. What's new?

Annoyed, particularly as when we bought this property we purposely looked at the EA flood maps to make sure we were not in a floodwarning area.