00:00My name is Nick Lupton. I live with my wife Annie in our house right next to the River
00:07Severn just south of Worcester. We've experienced quite a few floods over the last few years.
00:13It appears to be getting worse. Our house has got really good flood resilience measures
00:18in place but because of the increase in frequency of flooding that we're experiencing we decided
00:24to build a wall around our house. So we've spent last year building the wall and we tested
00:31it last winter three times with three floods that we had and it's worked very well. The
00:36main motivation for building the wall was to protect the house from the water. Over
00:42the years the bricks were never really drying out in the winter. Having now built a wall
00:49around the house it keeps the house bricks dry throughout the winter. There's been quite
00:53a bit of press interest in the wall, the Great Wall of Pixham. Due to the press coverage
00:59people phoning me up and wanting to know how they could build a wall or whether they could
01:04build a wall with planning permissions. After quite a few phone calls I thought I'd probably
01:10better to just write it all down on what we went through to tell the story of how we built
01:15the wall. I sat down and spent a couple of months writing it all up. Quite cathartic
01:20to do that and realise how much work we did put into building the wall. It was then picked
01:25up by Mary Longdono who is better known as Flood Mary. Mary has published the book on
01:32her webpage floodmary.com. It's a book about how to build a flood wall. Hopefully it's
01:39got enough information for somebody who is not a construction background or engineering
01:45background person to understand what goes into the detail of building a wall that will
01:52work and stop water getting into the house. It's available, it's free to flood victims.
01:59Expect the worst, prepare for it and hopefully you will be able to firstly keep the water
02:06from your house by putting the right mitigations in place and having a house that is recoverable.
02:12If you do get water in the house, how do you recover? Don't use fibre kitchen units,
02:18use plastic kitchen units so that you can disinfect your house and get back to normal
02:24living quite quickly.
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