Flood (con't)

 I’ve recently received the photos that our team mate took of our house when it was flooded. The above photo is of our kitchen.

This is the back of our house.

From the watermarks left on the wall, the flood waters reached just over 40cm in the bottom section of our house. Apart from dedication and commitment of our househelper who stayed overnight at our house and help from our team mates and neighbours we would have suffered a lot of damage to our furniture and household goods. At one stage our househelper and our team leader Nick lifted our large fridge up two steps (with food in it) onto a higher level as water was pouring into the house (we had 4 people move it back down into place). We only suffered water damage to some cupboards and the laptop battery. Major electrical items which were underwater, we allowed to dry before turning on and praise God that they were working!

Apparently there were about 5 eels swimming in our house at one stage which our househelper’s husband caught and cooked up for dinner.

According to our neighbours there was a worse flood about 10 years ago which reached about 1m in our house!

So another first in my life, I felt an earthquake (though very minor) in Lampang a few months ago and now I’ve experienced a flood. What’s next?

flood

 Nick (left); Samon (second from right) and Neighbours having a laugh about the flood in the middle of our flooded street.  Our house is below the level of the street.

We were on holidays in South Thailand about 1000km from home in Lampang. Around midday I check my phone and I have 6 missed called from our house that morning (2 on Lisa’s phone). i figured something must have happened at home and that it was fairly urgent that it couldn’t wait. I call home but no one answers the phone. Finally about 15 minutes later, our househelper calls me telling me that heavy rain has flooded the outside room at the back of our house which has our washing machine and is used for storage. However, water had not entered our house yet and the rain had stopped so there was no pressing need to return right away since it was the last day of our holiday anyway. The next morning at 6am I get a call from our team leader Nick and half asleep I answered the phone. He said something along the lines of, “Sorry Rich, but I think you’ll need to come home right away. It rained heavily last night and water had flooded the bottom floor of your house”. I thought he was joking at first but after a pause there wasn’t a “just joking Rich” and then I realised he was deadly serious. We quickly finished packing but then when I tried to start the car the battery was dead. Luckily another one of the guests knew how to jump start our car so that I could drive it to the nearest car dealership to get the battery replaced. However, this all took time and cost us at least an hour and half of the morning, time which we could ill afford as we had to drive back to Bangkok (300km), collect our son’s passport from the Australian Embassy and then renew our visas before the immigration department closed at 4:30pm. We reached the Australian Embassy around 1:30pm, had the passport by 1:45pm, drove to the otherside of Bangkok to the OMF head office to get the visa paper work and reached the immigration department by 3:00pm. Our OMF visa person was waiting for us and had already collected a number for us in the queue. By 4:20pm our visa renewal had been completed. I caught a taxi to the airport and then the final flight to Chiang Mai. Then taxi from Chiang Mai to Lampang. I got home just before 10pm.

This was the sight which greeted me apart from a strong moldy smell. I was relieved to see that the flood waters had gone out of the house. After eventually getting through to my wife I went to bed ready for the cleanup tomorrow. More about that tomorrow and the rest of what happened.

 This was our downstairs toilet