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Your Name
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Sue Trotter, admin
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Log: 22-10-atl-c-st
Name: Sue Trotter
Age:
Area: Tilbury School
We were just getting the three classrooms back after the first flood. Monday morning and we were telling parents that we were back to school and everything was back to normal. I was in the office, and the first thing that happened on that morning of the floods was that the manhole cover, in the corridor outside my office shot up into the air and hit the ceiling .
I was on the phone, telling a parent, ‘yes, we’re back to normal,’ and I had to say ‘no, we’re not!’
I had to go home at about 11am because my house was flooding. When I got there, the water was up to my thighs – I left the car up the road, and waded through all the pet fish and debris. I didn’t get out of the house for three days, it was too wet. We could get to the end of the road, but the corner of the road was flooded.
Nobody came, we didn’t see anybody. We went upstairs, and stayed there. My son came, waded down, and helped get the carpets out.
School was in a terrible mess. The next few weeks, we had to send the older children to Pickering High School, and some of the pupils had to use the old nursery block. It felt that wherever I went, I was flooded. But so were a lot of people round here. It wasn’t unusual.
During the six weeks holiday, we were trying to get stuff sorted at home, but we were having to be around for the contractors in school who were in, pulling everything out. We had one telephone line and a desk at school and that was it. We never knew when anyone was coming in, we had to order all the resources in for September. The deputy head and I had to work from her house to do all the ordering, because there was nowhere to even sit in school, it was such a mess.
The packing cases from the classrooms were all piled up in the hall right up to the ceilings, and it was a good thing in the end, because the weight of them kept the whole floor useable. Other school’s parquet flooring rose up into pyramids, but the packing cases saved ours.
As far as the school’s concerned, we’d never have got half the work done that was done, had it not been for the floods, so it’s been a good result in the end.
Personally, I had no bother with loss adjusters – we were back in our house in November. There’s still people in caravans now, over a year later.
There was a lot of hard work, with the stress and the physical hard work.
Now everytime it rains, we get a tidemark in the corridor. They’re checking the drains now, but it’s still not sorted. It’s been flooding there all the time I’ve worked here.
The outlying thing is the physical hard work. The caretaker and the staff worked solidly for weeks. There’s lots of us suffering with bad backs now.
There as no floor – during the summer holidays while we were still sorting the school out, we were walking along planks over joists. The smell was awful – as it was all drying out, the smell – terrible, unbelievably awful. I didn’t notice it at home, but here at the school, it was dreadful.
Ironically the only classrooms which were ok here after the flooding were the outside mobiles, which were up for being demolished. They brought an extra mobile classroom here for us to use, and they put it on the playground. They lowered it onto the playground, and the state of it – you wouldn’t have put pigs in it. It was falling apart. We had to get it fixed and refurbished, and by the time we’d done it, the rest of the school was finished, so we never used it in the end anyway. What a waste of time and energy that was. There was a lot of money wasted.
FLOOD STORY CATEGORIES & main themes
1) FLOOD DAY
GENERAL FLOOD STORIES
SCHOOLS
2) AFTERMATH/CLEAN UP
POSITIVE OUTCOMES
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