Webinar on Climate Change Adaptation: Flooding Part 2: Salvage Recovery and Restoration

Speakers: Dr Robyn Pender, David Drewe, Alice

Robyn: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the second of our two part series looking at flooding and emergency planning. In part one we looked at how to plan to avoid flooding if at all possible, and if you've got a risk that can't be got rid of, what are the preliminary actions you need to take to try to make sure you're prepared? So if you do get flooded, you get the least possible amount of damage and disruption. Today we're going to be concentrating on what happens, if and when, despite all your best efforts… Oh, I see (yes, next slide there). We're going to be concentrating on what happens if and when, despite all your best efforts that Flood actually happens to you. What do you need to do to cut the damage and distress that you're going to suffer? Because flooding is definitely a distressing experience, So what should you be doing when you hear floods are likely? When it's actually happening? And afterwards? I'm Robyn Pender and the work in the building conservation team. And over to David.

David: Yes, afternoon everyone. I'm David Drewe. I'm the Head of Engineering and Emergency Planning at Historic England. Those of you who have listened into some of these webinars before, you might have heard that a few times. My teams are a team of building services, structural engineers along with emergency planning and fire safety advisors and I think that's why I'm involved with this discussion this afternoon. Maybe anyway, so anyway. So let's get on to the today's seminar.

As Robyn mentioned, if you listened into our first one, you all know that this was about preparation. So the last time we talked about prep and hopefully. If you take that into account, you'll be in a really good position to cope with a flood or flooding emergency. OK. So you will know. For example, you will know what type of flood to that you are likely to me and how that flood might affect your property.

You may also recall that there were some certain obligations that you might have under certain rules or regulations within the UK, such as the Reservoirs Act as we discussed in their previous seminar.

You would have considered and done as much as you can to try and stop the water getting into your building. But also, even better, you might have worked out how to make things more resilient, so that if your defences are breached, the damage will be minimal and you can clean up and get easily back into your home or to work or business as quickly as possible.

You may have also joined a local flood group and been working together with your neighbours to develop a local flood plan and how you might respond to such things. And as we said in the in the previous webinar is that all these actions are part of your planning for flood event and this could actually be part and embedded into your much wider emergency plan, which is we will be touching on a couple of bits and that more today as we go through. Now for those of you that are regulars to these webinars, you'll know that every now and again we like, just to get you going.

We would like to give you a little question so the question we're going to ask now is. Which of these emergencies is not going to cause flood damage? So for example, a storm or a gale out in the sea. A wind a strong wind. That that type of type of storm. Flood or damage from freezing after a freezing spell of weather. So this slide down, or from a fire. So is it each of these? Or is it none of them? So let me know what you think. So again, we're talking about, do you think it's a coastal storm wind damage? Let's have a little vote. OK, I see a lot of people.

[They discuss an issue with the presentation slides].

David: So actually, as we said, it's is managed by all. In effect, all of these disasters can actually result in some final flood damage. For example, let me see if I can get the technology working. Over here yes, folks, up here, you know, a storm at sea or depression as we talked about these depressions could reach flood defences and you could end up getting inundated with floodwaters. A storm, even where it may not be associated with heavy rain. The physical damage from, say, tree damage on the building itself, could result in damage into internal services, so you could get a fracture of, say, water supply pipes, so you could get flooding as a secondary impact from there. This is a photograph of a flood that occurred in a building and then the actual flood water froze in situ, so you can obviously see there that freezing, freeze-thaw effects can be quite dramatic, and the last one, which when I get the little green mark to me, is a fire. It’ is obviously a fire. A fire can obviously introduce water into a disaster, into an emergency. So I'm just going to.

Robyn: I think the greatest amount of water usually comes from the fire brigade.

David: Yes, well it does in a fire I mean, not normally from a flood. I don't know if the fire brigade goes out deliberately to other places, but we'll find out maybe. So yes. We've not really mentioned firefighting and flooding before because obviously it's a slightly different thing. I suppose the main differences with this is it's, whereas what you might speak of as conventional flooding, you don't really have a choice as to where the waters have come from, whereas with a fire the water is intentional as it's there to suppress and put out the fire. Obviously cities in urban locations, water for firefighting is likely to come from, say, hydrants or it may be that the fire can be dealt with by the amount of water carried on fire appliances. However, this the source of the water for firefighting needs to obviously be enough. So that the fire brigade can deal with the fire. So what happens? Obviously, if there are no hydrants, or the supply to the fire appliances has run out.

The Fire Rescue service can actually use water from anywhere. Really, they can take it from ponds, rivers, even swimming pools to help fight fire. And obviously when they do this, as with other flood water, you need obviously to consider that this can introduce additional contamination into the firefighting waters.

As a point of interest, if you've ever seen these in canal walls, maybe you have, maybe you haven't, if you’re an anorak and go around looking at canals. These doorways were introduced in canal bridges to enable easy access for the Fire and Rescue services, I think during the second war so they could literally open and drop pipes or hoses into the canals below to be able to access the canal water and use them for firefighting. Also I want to mention quickly sprinklers.

So yes, I’ve been talking about what we might loosely call floodwaters from firefighting, but as you said, you know there may be the main reason you are using that is a way to contain and suppress the fire. So that so that in some ways less water is needed to put out the fire in the long term, so the purpose of a sprinkler system is therefore to try to reduce, which some people might not think it is, is to reduce the overall amount of water required to put a fire out.

So why the Bruce Willis photo? OK, well now we obviously all need a Bruce Willis to deal with an emergency, if we got the chance. But despite how Hollywood might depict the setting off an entire sprinkler system by, say, a cigarette lighter or match held under one sprinkler head. This is not how it works now, there are some sprinkler systems that are referred to as drencher systems, but these are very specialist systems, but they are used in many locations where, for example, you see the little big glass bulb in the sprinkler head. It's only the head that gets hot enough to break the glass bulb to where the water will come out. So if you’ve got sprinkler system in a building and it goes off, it's not going to have the whole building flooding. So just a point on that just to mention.

And the other thing I wanted to mention as well, again, is a method of firefighting, which I suppose not really strictly flood water in the sense of as we've been discussing, but it is. And again it's something that you're not likely to overcome, is this use of foams, but it is basically a mixture of water and a chemical. It's similar to what you find in a small fire extinguisher. If the fire service were involved, then they will deal with the aftermath of the foam. But as you can see the picture in the top right. There are now systems that actually do flood spaces with this type of suppression. So it's just something that you need to consider, because again it can add contamination into a building that you might need to deal with after the event.

Robyn: Yes, OK, let's go back to the overall plan because having a flood response plan is a really useful thing and you can break it down, as they have here in this diagram, into four steps. But you'll see that there's a lot of overlap between all those steps. They actually segway into one another. The first two steps are mitigation and preparedness. These were what we concentrated on in the last webinar. Just to refresh your memory about that, where you have to start is by getting to understand your particular building in your particular flood risks. And then you'll be able to work out what's possible to reduce those risks. So for a start, doing what you can to prevent the property flooding in the first place, or at least limiting how much of a flood you get. And that's not just a once off thing. You always want to be reviewing that because things do change. They can change in your building, and they can certainly change around your building. And sometimes those changes will actually cut the flood risk. But often there's a good chance we've made things worse, at least in some ways. So it's wise to be cautious and keep abreast of things. And that's so much easier if you have gone ahead and got involved in your local flood group, because that way you can be sharing multiple eyes and ears about what's going on.

Mitigation overlaps with preparedness. What's going to need to happen when you find out a flood event is on its way, or actually it's right upon you? For a start, you want to be confident you know when to launch your emergency plan, not just knowing what you want to do within that plan, but when do you set it off so? What are your trusted sources for the information that pushes that big red button? Well, keeping your eye on the weather is always the best start and the Met Office is so good these days at giving forward warnings. So things like storms which used to come more or less out of the blue. I really like the Countryfile weather forecast on Sundays because it gives you a really good picture of the shape of the whole week ahead and it's always better to take things seriously and be a bit overcautious because that gives you time to get ready without panic.

It's better to start those first steps of your emergency plan, and then have to park it all again when nothing happens to try and look like Mr. Cool, unbothered, and end up wishing you had been more proactive. Just think of it as a good chance to get in some testing and practice on your emergency plan and then if the flood doesn't actually arrive, don't see it as time wasted. Just breathe a big sigh of relief because you really don't want to flood, no matter how well prepared you are. It's like insurance is better to pay and never have to claim. So back to the warnings. When a floods is on its way. there's a standard warning system that issues district alerts and you need to be sure that you're getting those as soon as they come out in England.

The flood alerts come from the Environment Agency, from Natural Resource is if you're in Wales, or SEPA if you're north of the border and they all give three escalating levels of warning: the alert, that tells you need to be on your guard and that it's time to launch those first steps on your emergency plan; and then there's the warning, which tells you can expect to be flooded, and you know then to get all those remaining bits of your plan into motion; and then there's the severe flood warning, which is on another level because it really tells you that even if you haven't done all the things you wanted to on your plan, it's now time to get out and leave things to the experts. So over to David.

David: Again yes, OK. So you’ve got your warning and you know the flood is on its way. So the next step, obviously, is the response phase. So, it's what's happened in your flood action plan. So it's how we respond. So as we mentioned before, we talked about actions like turning off water at stopcocks, some valves, and the power to the building. It may be that you are looking to put sandbags where you can, or maybe make temporary sealing of things such as toilets to try and prevent floodwater entering the space. An idea that you should think about is, if you have to get out quickly, think about your own safety, What do you think you might need to take with you to evacuate, and although that's an important thing, we want today to concentrate on the contents, contents within the building and possibly, have not so much a domestic building but the same approach can apply to any building. OK. Yes, obviously the way to do this is as they do for any historic houses with collections and actually gives you a really good model that you can apply to whatever kind of property have.

Yes, OK, your things may not be say, internationally significant heritage artifacts, but they still probably matter to you and in some ways. All businesses have valuable contents and they might need to. They might need to keep safe or remove. I mean, it may be a good idea possibly to have things such as these sorts of absorption pads. Most advice, if you're looking at flooding, is to have a first aid kit available and this would be the sort of stuff you would have in there. So they get said if it's really good for dealing with link leaks, and obviously diverting water if you can. However, while these types of water absorption aids are great for dealing with diverting them protection safe and relatively smaller flood events, and we see temporary flood barriers that can help with much larger flooding events, where you get a deluge from above, say from within a building, then this is obviously more difficult. And it's, here's is where you either need to be able to quickly cover up all the equipment and stuff, or move it out of harm's way, assuming that is that there is obviously someone there to do this. Robyn.

Robyn: Yes, I'm always terrified by that when it comes through the electrics, I'm just horrified. Beyond trying to keep that water back or absorb it. What can you do to protect those things in your building that you care about? Well, the first thing you need is a good enough inventory of all the things you have that could be susceptible to flood damage. Do you know what you have that's most at risk, and if it is at risk, do you know what to do about it to prevent that risk. So it's always useful to remember that risk is likelihood of something happening multiplied by the damage you're likely to get If it does happen. So if you've got a library on the first floor of a building, it might be susceptible to escaped water, but not so much to other types of flood. But on the other hand, the books are super sensitive to water, so a librarian with a collection that includes some really important books is going to have things like sealable plastic boxes that they can quickly pack those their most fragile books into. And they'll also know where those books are so they can get them safe really quickly. But if you're libraries in the basement where the likelihood of flooding is so much more likely because there's so many more types of flood that could affect you, you're probably going to have to do more than that. So where can you move the books to? How quickly can you move them?

There are questions you need to ask, as well as knowing what you've got and where it is. You need to know how you handle it to keep it safe or at least minimise any damage to it when you're moving it. So if you've got a piece of furniture with gilding that will be damaged unless you carry it in a certain way, then you need to know that and you and everyone else who might be called up in an emergency need to have practiced carrying it about. It can't come up as a surprise.

David: That’s a good point, Robyn. I think what we should point out there is. Again is. I mean, that's an important point about dealing with salvage and the need to understand what is needed and how it's to be done and a lot of the time, obviously you know you do see instances where, with all good intentions, volunteers turn up, they want to try and help out as help to save as much as much as they can. And that's great. But obviously what you need to make sure is that the people that you let do this or work know what they're doing and can manage and control it and particularly within the sites I think we mentioned last time about hazards on site, you know the people who are familiar with the site will know where their hazards are and also had to do with it. But yes, it's just you just need to be careful with that.

Robyn: Yes, part of your emergency plan is how to manage the volunteers. That's going to come up again in a little bit.

David: Yes, exactly.

Robyn: Most of the flood prep actions aren't actually all that complicated. A lot of them are as simple as just pulling the furniture away from the walls, knotting up the curtains and piling the sensitive things like rugs and books up on top of other things that will cope like solid wooden furniture. This, of course, assumes that the flood isn't so high, it's just overcoming all the furniture as well. Moving things offsite or upstairs is even better, of course, if you can, but that's not always possible. One of the best hints I've heard came from Mary Donahue who says that she always tells people to get the car full and move it out of the way as the first thing, because if you lose the car, that's going to make things much more complicated, especially when you are trying to do response and recovery. I thought it was a very good point. Back to you, David.

David: OK. So, but really, what you don't want to be doing is just floating around, waiting for somebody else to be telling you what to do, or doing these things for you. Because by the time they turn up is likely to be too late. In some ways you need to be proactive in between moving things into safer positions, taking a really sensitive things off site, and alerting all the people named on your emergency plan, you'll actually find that there is a lot of practical and helpful things that you can be done.

But when a flood really hits and we're talking about severe flooding here, it's over to the professionals. Then you really do need to be taking your instructions from them. Because obviously most of their time their priority will be on lives rather than property, but you do need to be guided by what they tell you.

That's not to say that they won't. They won't help. I mean of often after the initial disaster is out the way, they can help move things out of harm's way. But then again, you'll need to have that emergency plan to explain to them exactly where everything is and what needs to be done to move it to safety.

That's something we cover in detail in our emergency planning courses which we run (Historic England), which again we're hoping to start up next year as soon as we can.

And just as an add on to that, last week someone directed me to a recent TV programme on BBC Four about Notre Dame, which is interesting to see how sometimes the lack of what they knew had impacted on their response to the event.

OK. But when it when a flood happens, you might get a fair bit of warning. Or you might have none. But that doesn't change what you need to do. It just compresses your time fraction. So the more you've worked to make those actions automatic, the better is going for you and your property.

For example, have you worked out what happens if the call comes in the middle of night, or when most people are on holiday? You need to plan for the worst case, not the best. Then the plan will always, well, always work within reason, and with that it's time for another question. Right, this is a pretty dramatic image of and will give you a clue. It's from a flood damage. So what we want to do is cast your minds back to the four basic sources of flooding, and I don't want you to include firefighting in this one, and that's the usual things, coastal, fluvial (or river) flooding, flash flooding, escaped water and what would like you to do is, have a little vote, and we'd like you to tell us what do you think caused this amount of damage?

Robyn: I think this is the trickiest one, that that I've had.

David: Well, if you saw it in the paper, in the press. You'd probably be OK about it, but not sure, OK?

Robyn: OK.

David: I think that's about good. OK, then, we will take it from there.

Robyn: Yes, well, I didn't get this one when it came through because it is escaped water. Yet again a burst water main in the road. Now I'm always going on about rising damp being due more to leaking pipes and mains and so, rather than anything else. But this one takes the cake. That's what I call rising water damage to a brick wall.

Anyway, the poor people. It’s actually amazing no one was seriously hurt in that. And it's a reminder that even the best planning can't be expected to take into consideration really dramatic and sudden events. So again, what you need is a robust plan that will just work not only for the events you can predict, but even for the ones that you can't.

So OK, you might not be able to prevent damage in the way you would if you had some warnings, but now you've had this sudden catastrophe. It's what you do next that makes all the difference to limiting the damage. Do the right thing and you won't be piling damage on damage, but do the wrong thing, In the worst, the results of that can be worse than the original flooding caused. And that's what we're going to be concentrating on now.

So now your catastrophe’s happening in your face with a flooded building, what do you do? And when do you do it? The first thing to realise is you might not be able to get back into that building immediately, because floodwaters are dangerous in and of themselves, and they're going to be hiding all sorts of dangerous things you can't see, like drains and sharks. And it's going to be something (there are sharks in Brisbane when it floods, by the way,) there is a problem there, and there's going to be some contamination. While everything is still wet and anyway access might be really tricky.

You need to take care of yourself here, not just your belongings. Then it all depends too on the flood. A lot of them sweet through really quickly, but sometimes they can hang about even for weeks like here at Tadcaster and that's really worrying, because the longer the building and the things in it are sitting there in the water, the greater the amount of water they're going to be uptaking and the greater that damage is going to be.

But even if you can get in quickly, the important thing is not to rush into doing anything that you might regret later. Take a breath. Take your time just to give an example. The tendency of many people and especially many overly enthusiastic clean-up volunteers is just to get rid of anything that's showing any sign of mud or water damage. But in fact, it's amazing what can be recuperated with just a bit of care, and that's really important because the loss of things like books and photographs and so can really be the worst part of the whole experience of flooding for a lot of people.

If you're not sure whether something salvageable or not, just set it aside somewhere it can start to dry and check it again later to see how it's going in a garage or something. And you know, even if you've got water sensitive stuff like paper and fabric, that's got wet, there are simple ways to get them dry, again, with pretty limited damage. And again, that's something we cover in our emergency planning courses. But it's true.

The problem can be the sheer scale of things. If you can't get to something like books or textiles quickly enough to sort them out properly, then what you can do is stop the real problem, which is more growth by freezing them until you can get to them and there are special freezers available for just that. I believe you can rent them too.

It's all going to be so much, much easier if you have that inventory that you prepared earlier to work too, and then you know exactly what your priority items are. If you've got a really important building and there's a lot of damage to it, like after a fire, then you're going to have to factor in working around the engineers and the archaeologists.

First of all, the building is going to have to be made safe before anyone can get in there. If you had something like part of the building collapsed, then reconstruction is going to need really careful plotting, where of where everything's come to rest, and that's the archaeologist’s job. And if the cause of the catastrophe isn't clear, then you probably also need to be factoring in waiting for the forensics to finish on site, and you can see how this response action actually really starts to overlap with that last part of the action plan, which is recovery.

I'm not sure you can even clearly say where one starts and the other stops. First thing when you can get in there, take lots and lots and lots of photographs and films. You really can't take too many. You're going to need them for cataloguing as well as for insurance. And again, it all measures in with your nice preflood inventory.

Remember the inventory? You're going to be so happy you've done it, when you get to this point. The sad thing is, even where it's a really simple flood, some of the insurance companies don't necessarily help the process to head in the right direction. We've been making big inroads on this, but there's still a very long way to go. Too many loss adjusters still don't really understand how traditional buildings in particular work and back to Rumsfeld, the known unknowns. They don't understand that they don't understand, and that's what's really dangerous. So even if you really do know what you're talking about, it can be hard to get them all their builders to listen to you. They are in a hurry and they want to pull things out, like those irritatingly over keen volunteers who toss out your grandfather clock.

They want to get the builders in there stripping the property. But not only does that much more damage to the building than the flood did, it actually makes the recovery time worse, not better. And the biggest example of that must be the plasters. Now, if you've got a gypsum based plaster that will probably have turned to pink slime and can be scraped off. If you've got cement tanking, that will be stopping the war from drying out, so you might want to be getting rid of that, but a good old-fashioned a good old fashioned lime based plaster is actually going to be helping that building dry.

Now it might be, eventually, after some months a year or two. You do need to replace it because it's a quite a lot of salt damage from that drying. But getting the salts that will be coming to the surface crystalising in the plaster rather than in your wall is a very good thing, as the plaster sacrificial it can be replaced. So hang on to those lime plasters for that drying period, at least.

And if you've got some solid wood furniture and fittings, they're probably going to stand up to getting wet, no problem. MDF will probably be gone for good, though, unless you are very quick. A shout out here, therefore, the benefits of good old-fashioned brown furniture. There is a reason they made it. The important thing with timber fixtures like floors, panelling, stairs and so forth is to leave it in place if you possibly can because wood can warp very easily as it dries. If you do have to open up to get access to something like an underfloor void, make sure that the people you've got doing it know what they're doing and they stack the wood, they take up flat and with spaces between so they can dry slowly. And it's best actually doing that in the room that you put the timbers back into so it can equilibrate to the conditions it's going back into.

What you definitely don't do is lean any of that timber up against the wall. Not a good thing for it. If the flood hasn't hung about for weeks, and you're lucky enough to have a traditionally constructed building of permeable materials like brick or stone lime that's been pretty well looked after, so it's not wet to begin with. Then what we've been seeing from our testing at Sheffield Hallam and what we've seen time and time again on site, like here at the Merchant Adventurers in York, is that the walls might not actually have got very wet at all in the flood, so drying might be easier and faster than the insurance companies think.

Cleaning is going to be important because the water's probably muddy and it might have things like oil in it too, but people get very alarmed these days about sewerage contamination causing lasting damage after a flood. It's a really overrated problem unless you've been directly flooded by your own sewers, which is very nasty, hence all our things about blocking toilets and using non return valves.

We've also got this. We've done some research on contamination and shown that it's not anything like as serious as the people selling post flood decontamination expertise tend to say, and Alice has very helpfully put the link up for you on the chat. For big floods, the Environment Agency points out that even if the flooding takes out a treatment plant, a sewerage treatment plant, the dilution (there's a lot of water as well as a lot of sewerage) is so high. that there's really no risk. So, at Appleby, Saint Lawrence, for instance, which is that lovely church in the bend of the River that we showed you last time, they were very distressed that their Victorian velvet pew coverings had been soaked and they were encouraged by one of their advisors to pull them out because of contamination. But very wisely they didn't rush to do that. They just let them stay in place. By the time we got there a few weeks later they had dried out beautifully and when we sent samples off for testing, there was absolutely no sign of contamination and, as the lab pointed out, that wasn't surprising since the moulds and so on, that are the problem can't survive on dry materials. So, as long as the drying is happening fairly quickly, you're not going to get an issue.

The trickiest things to clean are voids and hollows. And unfortunately that includes all the electrics. Electricity and water, of course, shouldn't be mixed. You won't be able to turn the power on until you've sorted all that out, otherwise you might end up with a fire on top of the flood and then more fire from the firefighting so it won't be a nice picture at all.

Wipe surfaces down, leave the windows open so you can get rid of the humidity that's coming off everything as it dries. You can see here in Venice they've got all their shutters open. If you've got scaffolding and tarps or something around the building that often happens after a fire, then you might find it helpful to move the air around a bit with a fan. But not too much. You dry slowly and steadily. That's the mantra. It's better for the materials, but it's also the best way of getting things really and truly dry. And if you want to find out exactly why that is, you can catch up with the common sense damp webinars I did in January and March. Which will tell you all about the background science, but putting it simply if you speed up drying too much, you actually stop the drying out of the bulk of the wall. So the surface might feel dry, but the dry surface is trapping the moisture and stopping it evaporating.

So if you're drying well, you'll actually find that the surface stays wet. Until the walls dry because the moisture has to come through it to evaporate into the air so that surface is going to be wet, wet and then all of a sudden it's going to be dry. As the bulk quarters gone.

You want ventilation, perhaps a low power fan to keep the air moving gently, and that supposed to getting in there with super-duper, high power fans and dehumidifiers and so on, and trying to get that surface dry quickly so you can redecorate. Because then after a couple of weeks, all that trapped moisture will start to make its way back to the surface again and suddenly you'll have damp patches the mould everywhere, and that's exactly what happened here at Hebden Bridge to the poor owner of one of the little gift shops there.

She had insurance and the insurance company pulled out everything they rapid ride and they replaced the walls and the floors and the wall plasters with cement and she was out of the building for months and then a couple of weeks after moving back. There the problem started to show through again. But her neighbours in little grocery really gone good contrast because they didn't actually have any insurance, so they just got in there. They washed everything down themselves, let it dry naturally and they were up and running again in three weeks with no problems. And even their fruit stand survived. Yes, so back to you again, David.

David: OK, thanks, Robyn, this is the last one on what you should try do. So, as we say, the recovery is this is completing that circular process and what you need to be doing while you go through that recovery process, you want to be making notes of what works and what didn't. Because at the end of it, once you have things back to back to normal as best you can, you want to be going back to your emergency plan and improve on it for the next time. You know, as they say, squaring the circle and all those sort of things people say because it's a sad likelihood that if you have been flooded once, there will be the next time. I mean, for example, do you remember the photograph of the house in Tipton. Well, this is what happened to a neighbouring house just a few months later. And yes, the same water main burst and just a bit further down the street and again they had the same sorts of problems all over again. Right.

Robyn: So how can we deal with flooding after earthquakes and tsunamis? Same sort of thing with tsunami is any seawater combines the problem of having salt in it. So you're going to have to think about what impact that has and how you do your cleaning. Better getting in there with a fair deal of water fairly quickly will help things. We don't, luckily, have too many earthquakes and tsunamis in England but they are a thing elsewhere, and as David would say, earthquakes are particularly bad because they tend to take out your plumbing so you get all the plumbing flooding and you get fires as well. So it's a tsunami of effects actually.

Alice: So Amanda Davies is asking do we know which audience are we aiming at? The householders or businesses or both?

Robyn: Both, because actually good practice is just good practice. Whether you've got a little teeny, tiny Victorian two up two down, a modern curtain wall, office building or a stately home, or a cathedral or something that the processes are exactly the same. You follow the exactly the same reasoning, you just have less to do if you've got a small place.

David: Yes, I mean it's like everything I mean. Obviously we're not suggesting that, for your own home use, you go off and have some complicated plan written up, with lots of drawings and plans and but the thought process of you know knowing where things are going to happen right now we don't know. Yes, are you in a flood risk area? Do you know, are you likely to experience flooding in the first place? We said earlier, do we all know how to turn off the electrics and particularly the water in our homes, if you were to suddenly get a burst pipe in a freeze over the winter? And as Robyn said, it's known waving problem documents are and what can you do in advance? You know, move the TV upstairs. That's probably the most important thing for most people. It might not be. It's just the scale. It just goes up in scale. In the same way as the fire service recommend that all households have a fire evacuation plan. That's a scaled down version of what they would expect you to do on a much more complex building.

Alice: Our next question is, what can you do as a preventative measure to protect listed buildings with flooding is likely to cause imminent damage.

Robyn: That is a very good question with a very big answer. It rather depends on what sort of damage. A lot of our listed building bridges have suffered because of the things that have been done to them in around them. So, for instance, some of the flood relieving arches were closed up or there's not the cleaning out of them that that is required. They get the highways come through and they put on a heavy load of road finish, so the bridges aren't behaving in the same way they did. It's very important, if you've got a bridge, that you do engage with all the people who are looking after that bridge, the bridge should have a sign on it that says who's responsible. So if you see, for instance that the flood relieving arches are blocked, you can contact those numbers to say that there is a problem here, but again, if all things, trying to sort the problem out before you get the flood is even more important for a bridge. Because if the bridges go out as they did in Cumbria then all the rest of the emergency response is hard for everybody. Now tanking?

David: But I would just say on that, though, that the one other thing, if you remember our first seminar. One of the things we did point out is that obviously the majority of flood events are actually from escaped water or burst pipes. I think it was 60% of all of all of the you know, flooding events in total so. Unfortunately, at the time you are unlikely to know that it's going to flood.

Robyn: And that's it. That's the insurance claims. And a lot of people have just have a fairly minor escaped water or don’t realise that's what it is. They just think they've got rising damp when it's actually water main leaking. They don't. It doesn't come into that listing, so it's I'm sure it’s much more enormous than that. Which leads on to the tanking thing, because often tanking is put on because there's a perceived rising damp problem, and actually it's a leaking water main or something like that. Now what happens when the flood water hits the wall with tanking? Well, because the tank is on the inside, so I don't know what people think it does. It creates this wrinkle, but what happens is that it tends to ping off, it tends to come off the wall, so It certainly does create more problems than it solves.

Again, what you're wanting is a lime plaster so that breeze will do you a lot more good. And if you've got a really serious moisture problem, track back to find out where that moisture problem is coming from, because it might not be where you think, and so I refer you all back again to those two webinars from the beginning of the year which go into that in more detail and my colleagues Nikki and Saki are doing another couple of webinars further in the year as well that you'll also find helpful.

Are there any benefits to external brick and stone sealants? Definitely not, because actually what they do is slow down the drying process. We covered this a little bit in the last flooding thing as well, and certainly I cover it in those webinars. The trouble is that water will, even if you could put a perfect sealant on which doesn't exist. The sealant manufacturers tell you it only knocks back about 90-92% of the water getting in. And of course then you've got water behind the sealing. It's got to come through again, and that's assuming that you're just talking about water through the surface because you get water in through all sorts of other ways. It's going to be coming from flooding, your plumbing leaks. It's going to be coming from a gutter leak. It's going to be coming from all sorts of things once it gets behind the surface. Whichever way it's coming from, it's got to evaporate through that surface, and in doing that it drops it's loads of things like salts, and there are problems with air trapping. And so what happens is you see that surface pings often and when we did a survey of flood surveyors in Worcestershire, 100% of them had seen this problem. So if you don't have a moisture problem in your building, the sealant might sit there without doing any particular damage. But the moment you get water you get a problem. So why would you put it on if you're not getting water?

So I come from a background working on wall paintings in conservation. I'm a physicist originally but working on wall paintings and all of wall paintings is dealing with the problems that come from having this coating on a wall surface and water coming through it. With the wall paintings we have the added problem that we're trying to preserve it because it's a sealant and it's causing those problems, but it's also very beautiful. I wouldn't put them on anyway. Can insurance companies be persuaded to make allowances for listed historic buildings? It depends on the insurance company. I'm on the DEFRA Flooding Roundtable and that has a lot of insurance companies around the table who really care about these things, who really feel that the listed buildings are actually very robust and a very caring about that, but it depends and it's always a moveable feat.

I notice we had wonderful Heather Shepherd on the call from the National Flood Forum and she will be tearing her hair out at that question because she battles with that all the time. So again, places like the National Flood from a very good source for finding out who are good insurance companies, I think.

Which types of building construction typically take a shorter time to dry out and which, conversely, take the longest? That's a very good question. I'm not sure I have the answer to that. It's the ones that don't wet up so quickly. And we're certainly finding that the permeable materials the traditional materials actually don't seem to wet up as much. They dry out more quickly because they can, whereas when you've got modern buildings made with raincoat, materials like glass and so if the water gets trapped in there, in the voids between layers. It can be really, really hard to get the water out of those. So in terms of the materials I suspect it depends more on the construction, than the particular materials, as Lottie was suggesting. So if you've got something with a lot of cracks, it could go either way.

Lottie, I will do some research and let you know, Sharon, you mentioned about the historic joinery, yes, and how this warps. Yes, I think in the event of a flooding, leave it alone if you possibly can. It will generally dry out. At the Merchant Adventurers we did actually allow the panelling to be taken off at the back of the wall because we realised there was a floor in the wall behind that they wished to repair. That had been the only place where water had come into the building in any significant way. So in that case we had top joiners who took the panelling out, looked after it very carefully and managed to get it back again without problems, but you know the risk to the panelling is very, very high, so you'd really want to be using very good people. If you can leave it alone and thank for floorboards.

OK control, we can't give a registry of specialist contractors unfortunately because we're a government agency. There are ways around that. Again the National Flood Forum is an absolutely terrific source of information, and so are the SPAB. A very, very good source that we help, but as a government agency we can't do that sort of thing. I know I wish we could, but we can't. Risy says piling furnishings on top of furniture can be… Yes, but also if you pile up things on them, they might not float anymore. But yes, if you can get it somewhere else, better still, but…

David: That's last resort in it, isn’t it?

Robyn: Yes, exactly it when you're in a hurry and you might want to stage it. You know, put some things there. Try and move everything else upstairs. It depends on the flood as well. Each… in from streaking stains, we have need to have to. I can't read the rest of that question. Just a second. We need to target trying modern plaster to this in the same room. Is there an ideal? Wood is one of the few things where you can measure a percentage relative humidity. So I think this is a question that I would refer to my timber expert colleagues. I think it's about matching what's going on it. Tony, you do want to drop us a question, we can pass that on to our specialist timber colleagues, for some, some more advice because I can see that's an important problem and this specific one that you'd like a specific answer to. OK Katie does seawater flooding have a more negative effect on a building than freshwater flooding? Yes, because of that salt and often because of the power behind it. On the other hand, it tends to be quite quick. It's in and out fairly quickly, but it can do really quite serious damage in terms of the salts. So it also depends on how soon you can get in there to clean things down. David, that was a run through.

David: Nice. There’s a load of questions for you, Robyn. That’s good.

Robyn: Yes, there should have been stuff for you, that's not nice.

David: Building problems. It's all those buildings getting wet, that's the trouble.

Robyn: Yes, David, say a bit about the Emergency Planning Course because I think that’s absolutely wonderful.

David: That's just a course that teaches you the bit before the event if you can, if that's the right way of looking at it and then that initial phase of what you do when you work with your agency services and we do a bit of flood management on it. We do make sure that delegates get nice and wet and they have to, but it's an escaped waterflood. I mean it's not, it's we don't. We don't teach them how to try and keep rivers back and stuff like that. We focus it on, as we said, that 60% risk which is a burst pipe of some kind or that type of flood, rather than the sort of big flood events that you see on the news because that's the thing we think most people have to deal with.

But yes, we're hoping to start running the course again next year, and again we're going to include extra elements there. Up till now, it's been focused quite heavily on what I would call historic houses, but after feedback, we're going to start to introduce elements in there that would be of much more interest to say a museums environment, because they do tend to operate in slightly different ways. So hopefully that would make it more interesting to a wider range of people, and I think as we said earlier, in some ways what we take out the building is OK, relevant to the sector we're in, but it could just be as easily be any import materials and it's the actual working with emergency services, which is the important part of that course rather than, as much as anything else, it’s that experience of working in a in a sort of real live event, if that's the best way we can get to it.

Robyn: It does put the fear of God into you, that's for sure.

Alice: We had one last little question not to forget that these practices are drying and repair for old properties, not just for listed buildings. Yes, very true.

Robyn: That's from the wonderful Heather Shepherd. And they’ve made the National Flood Forum an excellent source of not just advice beforehand but also emergency advice. When the flood happens, they always take their little caravan out and they are there to help people and they get us involved and so forth. It's really marvellous and flooding. It's best shared. Actually, there's so much that you can do by sharing the load. So you know, not working in isolation. Well.

David: Well, OK.

Alice: There you go, you guys are right on time with today's webinar. Thank you so much to Robyn and David for a really wonderful presentation on flooding. I think I learned a lot from that and I will be doing a home inventory to make sure that I know where everything is.

Robyn: Alice, I downloaded the program on the weekend thinking I can't just I have to practice what I preach.

Alice: You have to tell us what programme it is that you are using.

Robyn: No, not allowed!

Alice: That’s true. So just to wrap up myself, I've put on screens and web links to the other webinars to the advice and guidance. Unfortunately, we won't be adding the slide share for this webinar because we've got a few copyright images which we are allowed to use for presentation, but we can't share them in the slide share format, so just be aware of that, and I will be putting all the participants on hold now so that we can close the room. So we’ll do that in a few minutes and thank you very much for attending today's webinar. And again, if you have any further questions, please contact us via email [email protected], Thank you very much.

Robyn: Thank you guys, bye.