So good to hear things are turning around. A little schadenfreude to brighten your spirits:
My wife worked for years as a university costume shop manager. One year, during a kids' summer fine arts camp there was a storm and the shop (in the basement below the stage area) began to flood. She started trying to get costumes, fabric, and supplies all above the water level onto the tables, wading through the water knee-deep to save/salvage as much as possible, when someone in a hazmat suit from the university came by to let her know that the water wasn't just rainwater from the overburdened road gutters, but backflow from the overloaded sewers.
The laundry lasted for weeks.
One late Friday evening in July 2006, just after returning from holiday, someone reported a blockage in a sewer on our street. Our houses were just about 6 years old. Unbeknown to us, the council contractors started jetting the "blockage" - to no avail. The blockage was a "bung" that had been left in a pipe immediately outside our house, negligently, when the houses were being built.
Consequently, when being jetted the raw, untreated sewage had nowhere to go except out of our downstairs toilet - like a fountain that shot 6 feet in the air. In 5 minutes flat, the whole of our ground floor was 6 inches deep in raw, recognisable faeces and other sewage. I was barefoot in this mess immediately it happened and spent 4 hours with the contractors trying to slop it out through the front door and patio doors.
We (Lara and I) + our 5 cats were forced out of the house for almost 22 weeks until the ground floor, kitchen units et al, had been sanitised, ripped out, dried out and replaced at a total cost of £40,000.
It was, aside from the death of my parents, a divorce and being burgled, the most traumatic thing that's ever happened to me and I was ill for weeks after it happened as a result of inhalation of some very noxious substances and contact with extremely unpleasant microbes. The stress didn't help much either.
I have enormous sympathy for Francois in this situation as it's an awful thing to happen to anyone. Sadly, with the effect of climate / weather pattern change and working as a HO Underwriting Manager for an insurance company, I have to deal with the aftermath of literally hundreds of flood losses every year that cost my company many £millions.
