S1E114 - Colin on Flood Plains and Water Damage

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Colin and Brooke talk about flooding, water damage, and how to avoid having your home damaged by those things.

Guest Info

Colin (he/him) is a carpenter, industrial electrician, and backpacker.

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Colin on Flood Plains and Water Damage

**Brooke ** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. And today our friend Colin is joining us again, this time to talk about flooding and dealing with water damage. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Doo doo jingo here!

**Brooke ** 01:40 And we're back. Colin, thank you for joining us again today. And this time to talk about dealing with floods and water damage. Would you remind your pronouns, where you hail from if you want, and a bit about your background?

**Colin ** 01:52 Yeah, my name is Colin, he him. I'm from Pittsburgh. And I've been a contractor sort of on and off for the last about 20 years, as well as working in the power plants and industrial electricity, and sort of in and around industry for about the second half of my life. And, yeah, it's, I'm glad to talk about floods, because it's one of those things we're seeing more and more. And unfortunately, it's probably going to happen to pretty much everybody who's listening to this podcast at some point in their life in one form or another.

**Brooke ** 02:27 Yeah. And we've talked about flooding on the podcast before. I don't know that we've ever done a whole episode on it by any means. But it has definitely come up as we've talked about news and other major events. And you and I even talked about it when we did our first episode, a little bit. So I think it's—itll be good to dig into, you know, a nice reminder of what to do and not to do in a flood. And then also, I don't think we've ever talked much about flood recovery. So I'm excited to learn and teach more about that today. I wanted to share one of my own stories about flooding, if you don't mind me kicking off with that before we get into all the do's and don'ts and how tos.

**Colin ** 03:12 Yeah go for it.

**Brooke ** 03:13 Okay, cool.

**Colin ** 03:14 Everybody's got one of those stories.

**Brooke ** 03:16 Seems like it. Well, when I was growing up in the 90s, there was a major flooding event where I live. My hometown. It was built around a river, which of course is true of most older cities, right, because access to fresh water is critical for survival. And then there are also a lot of creeks that run through my town and feed into the river. And I live in the Pacific Northwest and it rains a whole lot here. So we're kind of accustomed to having occasional sudden and heavy downpours and the possibility of some rainwater pooling or briefly flooding. It's not uncommon. But this particular event when I was a teenager was something else. It was a really complicated set of weather events that led to it. But the important part is that, so the creeks that are all over town are overflowing. And then the river, it doubled its level on the first day of the heavy rains. And then within the next two days had crashed at its banks, and then for three days after that remained at flood levels. So the city's downtown area, for instance, it's fairly flat, it's right along the river, and most of the homes there have basements. So in addition to streets flooding, the basements flooded, filled with water. There were houses that got washed off their foundations, of course cars got washed away. And then even in other parts of town where there wasn't, you know they were more on the hills or what have you, there was so much water in the ground that it caused foundational issues to a lot of houses because the pressure of the water pushing on home foundations are running around it. And there had been an ice event right before the rain started that had caused his damage to a lot of pipes. So the