Write Off or Whitewash?

Based on a true series of events.
Place; Hull, East Yorkshire, UK
Date;  25.06.07

It started to rain hard at about 2pm on June 24th 2007 and did not cease until well into the following day, a Monday.

The excessive and unprecedented volume of surface water produced under these climatic conditions caused the sewers and domestic drains to become overwhelmed and discharge onto the public highways, footways and around a good proportion of the city housing.

Mrs Bravo, as we will refer to her, was anxiously watching the weather from her terraced house at 84 Prince Consort Road, Hull.

In the street outside there was a wall of water across the full width of the carriageway and passing cars caused a violent bow wave and tidal type bore which lapped the murky tide at her very doorstep.

Her garden wall provided a barrier against more significant wash and thankfully the clearance from forecourt to the level of the airbricks was not breached.

Running through to the rear of her house Mrs Bravo watched as a swell of murky water approached across the rear garden. A solitary airbrick, redundant after concreting of the back lobby floor, disappeared under the surface but did not provide any potential for further ingress.

The remainder of the length of wall to the kitchen and rear living room remained free of any inundation to its airbricks.

The hundred year old house had been built sufficiently out of the ground to resist a one in one hundred year flood event. No water entered the property and after conversing with her neighbours Mrs Bravo learnt that they too had escaped any ingress.

It had been a narrow escape. Ten thousand households in Hull were not so lucky.

A few weeks later mould appeared in a kitchen base unit and erring on the cautious side, as was her nature,  Mrs Bravo casually rang her Insurance Company to notify them of this observation.

She was not otherwise too concerned, after all the house had not been flooded. It was an old house. Moisture and mould sometimes happened.

Surprisingly, in early August, a Surveyor arrived. He had been engaged in a roundabout way by a Flood Remediation Company themselves at the beck and call of Loss Adjusters and so on up to the Insurance Company.

Even more startling was the recommendation for a full strip out of the ground floor as advocated by the Experts.

Mrs Bravo respectfully asked why this was necessary given that no water had entered her house.

No satisfactory explanation was given.

Faced with an impending invasion by contractors Mrs Bravo moved upstairs with her possessions. The bathroom became an impromptu kitchenette, the three cats resided in the back bedroom and Mrs Bravo formed a bedsit in the front bedroom.

The haste of the builders to attack the job in order to move on to a vast backlog of similar work in the flood stricken City led to their depositing of the larger items of furniture in the back garden along with the carpets which were soon ruined by the open air and by now cold autumnal weather. Although in no way damaged the casualty list of stripped out items was added to by the central heating system and gas fires. 

The estimated time of enforced upstairs living was given as no more than 12 weeks, therefore well before Christmas.

In January 2008 the house remained as an empty shell.

The project cost to return the house to habitable condition was running at £40,952.56. 

Worryingly there was no apparent co-ordination between the Insurers, Loss Adjusters, Surveyors, Remediation Company and the on site Builders.

Mrs Bravo had suspected this all along from observing the comings and mostly long goings of personnel from her first floor vantage point.

A meeting of all parties in late January 2008 was an opportunity to express concerns and apportion blame for fundamental omissions of a Health and Safety nature and not a little shock that Mrs Bravo was still in residence when in such projects the policyholder would be moved out and found suitable alternative accommodation.

Closer scrutiny by those responsible for issuing payments for work done could not account for invoiced figures for a number of items including replacement joinery, plastering and flooring which simply did not exist.

One individual claimed item was loosely described as "Flood Allocation uplift figure" at £12,720.91.

Works and squabbles dragged on and it was not until July 2008, more than a year after the event, that the Surveyors felt able to certify the project as having been satisfactorily completed. Mrs Bravo was not of the same opinion and added a lengthy list of incomplete items and complained that the attendance on site by the main building company to attend to snagging was not welcome given performance or lack of it to date.

The Loss Adjusters sent to the Insurers a Final Report and note of costs charged under the claim in the sum of £58,936.

Resuming as much of a normal life as possible Mrs Bravo re-occupied the whole house.

In August 2009 dampness surfaced in the repaired parts of the property.

The Flood Remediation Company under whom the builder had been sub contracted were instructed to carry out any such works as necessary at their own cost as part of warranty and after sales service.

Mrs Bravo was by now frustrated and distressed by her experiences and in September 2009 took action independently by engaging the services of a Claims Consultant Company to try to sort out the whole mess. Ironically the Claims Investigators were a subsidiary company of the original Loss Adjusters but it took a couple of months for them to realise, declare their vested interest and drop out.

The National Flood Forum, approached by Mrs Bravo, became involved and sent along an impartial Surveyor to inspect and advise.

With very little investigation a number of significant and fundamental defects and deficiencies were revealed in the extensive works undertaken under the claim. There had been no ventilation provided in the sleeper walls under the replacement ground floors. The Electrical system was not to Regulations. Dampness persisted in previously stripped out and reinstated areas.

The Loss Adjusters disputed that anything more than minor works were required.

Under further and more detailed inspection the suspicions of the impartial Surveyor were confirmed beyond doubt .

The only reasonable course of action was to strip out, again, the whole of the ground floor.

This incurred a further cost of £37,062.55.

The Combined Grand Total ,give or take a few pence, stood at £98,000. The market value of the property at the time of the original claim was somewhat less.

As part of the inevitable enquiry into the scandalous chain of events the extensive paper trail was scrutinised in fine detail.

Way back in August 2007 it appears that the original Surveyor had made written notes to the effect that water did not appear to have entered the house.

It was estimated that to address the initial concerns of Mrs Bravo, a sum of around £4000 would have been sufficient to cover a worse case scenario of any and all eventualities.

The closing remarks of the National Flood Forum attributed the vast difference in figures to negligence, contempt and greed.