The eye of the storm

We’ve just spent three days recovering from a very bad storm that hit south-west France on Friday night – saturday morning (along with Spain, Portugal and parts of Italy).

Along with more than 1,000,000 households in the region we were without electricity, telephone, internet or mobile phone communications while bits of roof and fencing fluttered around in the garden. I didn’t realise that mobile phones would also get shut down, not sure how that happened.

The strangest thing about being cut off from the world is that you have no idea what is going on! We found some batteries for a radio and heard that President Sarkozy was visiting the ‘disaster region’ but otherwise had little idea what was happening – would the power come back on in a day? a week? Had people been hurt?

The occasional helicopter flew past, surveying us, but they didn’t stop or throw food parcels to us, which would have added to the excitement a bit. If they had stopped they would have found it was unnecessary anyway, because we had two freezers full of food that needed to be eaten in the next twelve hours.

Someone told us that after the 1999 storm households were told they should always have a supply of water, radio with batteries, and tape (for sticking across exposed windows) in preparation. Water especially is a good idea – luckily ours never went off, but many around us had no running water either. Candles also are highly recommended.

Have you seen the Will Smith film ‘I am legend’? (I might have the name wrong – it’s ‘Je Suis Legende’ in French but might be completely different in English). In the film, during the day all is well, but when night falls, so does panic. That was our house. Our few nightlights gave out almost no light, and in the absence of TV, internet, heating and light the house descended into misery.

Children without MSN, youtube or telephone text messaging are not a pretty sight. Happily on night two we suddenly remembered the portable PC was charged up  and watched a DVD on that, which calmed our tattered nerves slightly as we were all dreading an evening of ‘monopoly by candlelight’.

We also remembered that Mrs B had inherited an oil lamp from her granddad a few years ago, and although it hadn’t been used for perhaps 30 years it worked fine. Did people use to manage with such litte light? A large and impressive looking thing, in reality it gave out less light than a candle.

A lot of people, it seems, had generators hidden away that could be pressed into service. Unfortunately a lot of them had forgotten that you can’t use a petrol engine in the house, and at least 30 people were hospitalised in the Dordogne department alone from carbon monoxide poisoning, and more than 100 across the region as a whole.

Anyway, all is more or less back to normal now, and we just have to submit the insurance claims for the roof, freezer etc.  Two of our roofs were damaged – one that was completely replaced four years ago, and another that was repaired just last year. The main house roof, untouched for 200 years, had no problems at all. Strange but true.

The insurance comapny have also asked for photos of the food that was in the freezer and needs replacing, with receipts if possible. Does anyone keep their receipts for frozen food? Even photographing it seems a strange idea but I suppose they can’t be too careful – there might be thousands of people claiming they had a freezer full of venison when really it was crammed with frozen peas and fish fingers.

On balance we were lucky of course. Parts of the Landes department suffered very serious damage to housing, in Spain some children were killed in the place where they had taken shelter from the storm etc. Many places suffered far worse than us and our thoughts are with those still lacking water and electricity. EDF and the army appear to be doing a very efficient job at dealing with the problems as quickly as possible.

We were going mad after two days without utilities, but some parts of the region are expected to have to wait two weeks before ‘normal life’ is resumed. I can’t begin to imagine what mood you’d find us in if we were abandoned that long, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be a pretty sight.