Chez Augustin

There was one thing I was always sure of: of all the disasters and calamities that could befall me, flooding was not one of them. We live and work on both sides of the dividing water line very near the top of a hill. But I was underestimating the ability of nature to fight back against urban encroachment.

What follows is meant to be a light-hearted account of the flooding of my business premises. It is written mostly for my friends and family who might care about the details. More importantly, it is written with the full awareness that I was very lucky, and that on the same day, in the same city, the situation was much more dramatic for thousands of other people. But the most important of all is that I would like to spread awareness about long term solutions, and about ongoing campaigns to promote them.

Ignorance is bliss

Thursday, the 17th of July, 2008.

9:30pm. I just finished my working day. Presently, I am walking home. It's raining. And windy.

I never watch television. I don't read the newspaper. I am usually fully unaware of the latest national news. Even so, I believe that I am much more informed that average about the issues that matter, the real causes of some common problems, and possible solutions. One thing I am never informed about, though, is the weather predicted for the next day. Usually I don't need to know: I work indoors, and rain or shine, I still have a 15 minutes walk from home to work.

So, it is only as I am walking back home that I become aware that the typhoon season is upon us. I recognize the pattern of not too heavy rain mixed with winds. I reccon the typhoon to be a mild one. I shrug it off. Over the years, this has become a routine for me. At that moment, what matters to me the most, is that I am quite successful at avoiding most of the rain by placing my umbrella in front of me, pushing on the top of the umbrella with one hand, helping it to withstand the wind so that it doesn't break.

I arrive home mostly dry. Soon, I fall asleep in the blissful ignorance of what is about to happen the next day.

It all started like in a dream

Friday, the 18th of July, 2008.

6:00am. I am dreaming. It's a long dream where I visit some unknown city. I wanted to go somewhere else but I landed here instead. So I wander around the city. Presently, I am trying to find my way back to where I came from. I find out that the streets are flooded with water. It doesn't look like a disaster, though. The weather is nice. The streets are mostly deserted. A lady is crossing the street where the water is the shallowest. I get my feet wet, too, crossing the street in the same spot but in the other direction.

Later that day, Cho, my wife, would tell me her own dream: She was home (at her parents). Water was dripping heavily from the ceiling. She placed buckets under each dripping spot, but she couldn't keep up. The buckets were full, the dripping spots too numerous and the dripping too heavy. The house was getting flooded.

Throughout the night, when we half awoke from our slumber, we could hear the heavy downpour outside. Heavy rain is often at the tail of the typhoon. The downpour usually comes when the winds have subsided.

Certainly some skeptics would say that the thundering sound of the heavy rain would have influenced our subconscious and would have been the cause of our dreams. However such downpours happen many times a year and we don't usually dream anything related to them. This time both myself and my wife dreams about some form of flooding, as translated by our own subjective unconscious.

6:45am. I just stepped outside. The rain has not abated a bit. I am holding the umbrella low and close to me, trying to at least maintain my upper body dry. At first, I think that I am making a good job of it. 15 minutes later, as I arrive at the housing complex where my office is, it's obvious that I have lost this battle: I am completely drenched from head to toe. Ah! never mind! I always keep some clothes in the office for such eventualities. Soon, I think, I'll be able to change back into dry ones.

As I walk across the inner court yard of the housing community, I have my first real glimpse of the amount of rain that has fallen during the night. The whole inner yard is flooded in 10~20 centimeters of water. It's impressive. It's certainly not as deep, but I wonder if it's as large as an Olympic swimming pool. In any case, it's not much an obstacle for me: dressed in shorts and wearing reef sandals, I happily waddle through the water. It's almost exhilarating. Little do I know yet, that I am soon going to fall from this euphoric high.

Presently, I am in the street, right in front of my office. I am watching the iron curtain slowly rise. As it lifts off the ground, I am starting to wonder if I am having hallucinations, or if something is really amiss. No, I am seeing clearly: water is flowing from the ground floor of my office into the street.

Death by electrocution, laziness and stupidity

7:00am. I enter into the shallow swimming pool. The first level is covered with water which flows over the small step at the bottom of the French windows and into the street. This level is actually empty and almost unused, so it doesn't really matter. Two pieces of furniture got their feet wet. There is nothing else here. What's more worrisome is where the water came from: it is still flowing down the stairs from the upper levels.

The whole premise contains three levels. There is the ground floor. The middle floor is half a story higher than the ground floor, towards the back. And there is is the second floor which is both above the ground floor (which has a very high ceiling) and the middle level. Thus, the second floor has the same surface area as the two lower levels together.

I go up. On the floor of the staircase, we placed a mosquito zapper. Many people usually go in and out of the premise and we can't avoid mosquitoes coming in. The zapper strategically placed there reduces the number that make it to the second floor. Unfortunately, the zapper is plugged into a trailing socket which goes back to the storage room at the back of the middle level. The trailing socket is laying on the staircase, in the middle of the flowing water. I can see the luminous indicator: it is on.

Damn! I have a live socket in the middle of the water in which I am waddling! Before going further up, I go to the back storage room, insert my key into the key hole (half expecting to get electrocuted in the process!), get in and pull the plug from the wall socket. I notice that the storage room is also under a few centimeters of water. Many cardboxes full of books and papers were placed on the floor. They are all sitting in water.

I go to all the way up to the second floor: from the top of the stair case, I notice that the whole second floor is also under a couple of centimeters of water. From the staircase landing, I can see my office situated at the front. Through the open door, I can see the trailing socket on the floor. My computer, the monitor, etc. are all plugged in it. I can see from the luminous indicator that the socket is still live, even though nearly floating in the water.

Then I remember: yesterday when I left the office, I had left my computer on. I was in the middle of a major web site upgrade (the beneficiary will recognize himself), and I had several KDE sessions open, each with several konqueror windows open with several tabs. Each represented a certain piece of information that I still had to process to complete the jobs I was working on. It is a very environmentally unfriendly habit, but when I am in the middle of a big job like this, I am often too lazy to make temporary bookmarks of all the windows I have open, preferring to leave the computer on overnight and closing each window as each sub-job is done.

Presently, I am trying not to make waves as I approach my office. I can hear the computer still humming. The water line is dangerously close to the top of the trailing socket. I was not aware that the sides of them were build to be waterproof!

For a short while, I consider making my way around the desk to shut down each window I have on in an organize manner, so that I can turn off the computer. But then I assess the likelyhood of making one wave too many and precipitate a power short (short circuit?) which would electrocute me to death. I can only imagine my epitaph: Augustin, died while trying to power off his computer in an orderly manner.

Hmmm. Let's play it safe. I only take one step into the office, reach for the wall socket and pull the plug off the wall altogether. The humming sound from the computer dies suddenly.

I must admit that I felt a bit scared for a while, and probably for a good reason. I feel that I have just had another brush off with Death. To play it really safe, I go back to the middle level and turn off the electricity at the main.

Assessing the situation

7:12am. As I had guessed while I was still downstairs, the water is flowing out from the bathroom, at the right of the staircase. The premise is at the bottom of a 10-story apartment building. The bathroom evacuation pipe is connected to the water drains coming down from the roof. The amount of water coming down the roof is too much to be evacuated in a timely manner and a large amount is forcefully coming back up through our bathroom pipes.

The bathroom is at the back, right next to the staircase. However, the water spilling out from the bathroom does not flow directly into the staircase down to the level levels, where there is comparatively less damage to be done (There's "only" the cardboxes full of books and papers placed on the floor of the storeroom). No, that would be too kind. Instead the water flows towards the front of the premises, into our two offices, just for the pleasure of toying with the computer trailing plugs and various paper bags full of documents sitting on the floor.

Only when the offices are full enough, does the water start to flow back into the staircase. When it reaches the middle level, one would have thought that it would proceed forward to the front, like it did on the upper level. But no: that would have been too convenient. Forward is the way to the staircase down to the almost empty ground floor. This time the water decides to flow backwards, making sure that the storeroom at the back is thouroughly covered in a few centimeters of water before the water deigns, finally, overflowing further down. Much later, after the ground floor has filled up, the water will end up spilling into the street.

So the water went out of its way to make sure to cause the maximum damage even under the circumstances where flooding could not physically exceed a few centimeters. That is I guess an example of Murphy's Law, or what we would call in French la loi de l'emmerdement maximum. However rusty your French might be, if you know what merde means, I'm sure you can decipher the rest.

What do I do now? I am completely wet. I just arrived at the office to find it completely innundated. I barely avoided being electrocuted but managed to pull various plugs and switch off the electricity at the main. Water is still furiously erupting into the bathroom...

First, I notify the building management. I don't expect much help from them. They are too busy using their only water pump to evacuate the water from the inner court yard. Second, I call my wife, wake her up and urge her to come immediately. Third... well third, sit down in the water and think...

Bailing out

8:23am. Cho having arrived and made her own assessment of the situation, we are now two to be thinking.

Cho went to see the management. She comes back with the building manager himself who has arrived. Just as he splosh-splash his way up the stairs, the inflow of water gains a sudden furious vigor that I had not witnessed earlier. The bathroom floor drain now makes a little geyser. The bathtub with was empty when Cho went out, is now full and overflowing. A torrent of water cascades down the stairs. The sight is a bit overwhelming...

From the management we hear that down is the city, situated in a basin between the hill where we are and the Central Mountain Range on the other side, the situation is quite bad, with many houses being really flooded. The main avenue and many other adjacent roads are under water. Ergo, needs are more pressing elsewhere, and we can't expect help from a plumber any time soon. The manager goes away, leaving us cope ourselves.

Obviously the first order of business is to stop the inflow of water from the bathroom. The only solution that remains is bailing water out. Cho and me try to get organized to that effect. She scoops water into buckets, and I carry the buckets to the front window and empty them into the street. The floor is slippery, just a bit less so with my reef sandals on than barefoot, so I can't hurry. After a few back and forth, we must admit that it's pointless. Water is arriving at a higher rate than we can bail it out.

Suddenly, I notice another exit route for the water: the toilet bowl! We try flushing the water down the toilet and it works. No need to walk back and forth to the window. For some reason that I can guess, the toilet canalization is made larger than the water drain. And importantly, the two pipes are completely independent. So I only need to scoop bucketfull of water from the bathtub and pour it down the toilet. Soon the water level inside the bathroom starts to recede.

So, while Cho starts to tidy outside, I continue bailing water out into the water closet! However, after a good half an hour to an hour, I become tired and discouraged: what if it rains continuously for 24 hours (not an improbably possibility)? And it still wouldn't solve the problem in the long term. Discouraged and exhausted (I usually don't exercise much), I leave the water have its way...

We are back to square one, and there is not much we can do. We just spend a large part of the day waiting for the rain to stop and for a miracle to fix the drain pipes.

Having failed at finding an immediate solution to our problem, we start thinking about the evening. We were supposed to have classes. Cho calls all the students to inform them that the classes are cancelled. We actually didn't need to: the local government had announced much earlier in the day that not only school but work was cancelled for the day. This is a rare occurrence. It is quite common when there is a typhoon to cancel primary school classes so that the younger students can stay at home, but today all school was cancelled and public servants had the day off, too. So, today we are freed from classroom duties and can concentrate on water...

The cavalry arrives...

Mid-afternoon. It's still raining. I go back to the lobby of the housing complex. I want to borrow the water pump. Only with the pump can we start cleaning the mess everywhere. I notice the inner yard is now empty of water. I ask the building manager if he can lend me the water pump. Of course, he replies most affably. I yell back at him: why couldn't you say it earlier? Indeed, earlier in the day Cho had asked the same question, but, embarrassed, they managed not to answer the question: their primary concern was to dry the community yard. Their own mission accomplished, they are now willing to help us a bit. A guard is sent back with me and the pump. Once put in place, the bathroom is empty within a couple of minutes. After that, the pump dies and comes back to live alternatively as still more water comes in up the drain pipe. The manager has finally come, too. They will need the pump overnight, in case the yard gets flooded again.

So, even though we might possibly start drying the premises off, we face the very possible prospect of it all being for naught as we'll be left without a pump and certainly more rain during the night.

Maybe at that moment the manager starts to realize the plight we are into. He goes back to his office and goes through the yellow pages, looking for a plumber who might, by any chance, be available today of all days. Eventually, one is found and comes to our rescue. By now, the rain has abated a little. The plumber and his wife (?) insert a long metallic cable into the drain pipe and starts probing. After an hour or so, he finally announces that the pipe is now clear. We shouldn't have any more flooding problem again. We pay him and he leaves. I later hand the receipt to the manager, who needs a stern comment from me to understand that there's no way we'll accept footing the bill. The pump goes back to the community lobby.

News from the battle front

6:00pm. Presently, the rain has stopped. The bathroom is dry. All the rest of the office space is under water.

Cho and me decide that we are not equipped enough to dry everything. We walk to the shopping street and buy some mops and other utensils. On our way back we stop in front of a shop window (a doctor's office, really), and we watch the television we see there. We don't hear the sound, but most programs on Taiwanese televisions are curiously subtitled, including the news, so we don't miss much.

We see images of the devastation in Taichung City, right down our hill, in the basin. Other parts of the country have been affected too. 15 people have died, apparently (a toll that would soon climb to 19 people + 7 missing). In many places, the water level went all the way from the ground floor to the first floor (i.e. one whole floor). People are bailing mud out of their houses. It rained a full 1000 millimeters of water in a day, which is a record. I will later learn that the record amount of precipitation in France was 840 millimeters in October 1940 in Llau (Pyrénées-Orientales).

As we watch the news, we fully appreciate how lucky we actually are.

Our tv watching session is interupted when we notice a man inside the doctor's waiting room, waving at us with the remote control in his hand, laughing. Oh! He wants to turn the tv set off. We smile, wave back and go on our way...

Cleaning #1

6:30pm. Having secured the tools, we are now back in our office. It hasn't rained much in the whole evening. The pipe is supposed to be unblocked. Cho and me diligently work at mopping the water out. With a broom, I scoop the water into the dustpan, empty the dustpan into a large bucket and when the latter is full, I empty it into the water closer, or, later, into the street. We mop the last puddles dry.

9:30pm. The whole office is now passably dry. We haven't had time to deal with the wet papers and boxes. We are tired. We go home, order a pizza, swallow it down and go to bed.

During the night, we hear the sound of torrential water pouring down the skies...

Déjà vu

Saturday, the 19th of July, 2008.

7:00am. I have classes this morning. A few minutes earlier it was pouring, but the rain abruptly stopped just before I had to leave the house. So I decide to walk to the office without umbrella. The building management had kindly offered us to use the community meeting room for our classes today. We guessed our classrooms we feel too damp and humid, so Cho helped me to draw a notice to stick on the front door, to redirect students to the community lobby. I'm waiting to see how the air feels inside to make a final decision on where to have my morning classes.

I arrive at the community. The inner yard is flooded again, but only a little. A person wearing shoes with thick soles would be able to walk across it without getting wet feet. I splash happily in the water with my reef sandals.

Now, I am in front of our office iron curtain. There is the inevitable suspense as I watch the curtain slowly rise up. Through the glass of the French window, I can see that inside looks clean and smooth. Obviously: we washed it the previous evening with a fair amount of water! But what is this reflection of myself that I see in the window? Is it normal, or is the reflection made clearer because... because...

I step in and confirm straight away what I feared. The ground floor is flooded again. The reflection I was seeing was not in the window, but in the still water covering the whole floor. There is water on every level, just like the previous day. This time, though, the plugs and books are out of the way.

Well, there is not much I can do now. I stick the notice on the front window, notify the management and prepare my teaching material into bags to carry to my replacement teaching room. The first student arrives a half hour early at 8am. I teach until 12am. Cho is teaching the whole day elsewhere in town, so I'm alone.

The plumber is busy but promissed to come in the afternoon to have another look. I had a class outside in town in the afternoon, but I cancel it so that I can be here for the plumber.

After lunch in the restaurant next door (who got water leaks seeping through the wall from our office into their premises!), I start cleaning #2. I dry as much as I can on every level. At 5pm, having had a large mid-afternoon snack, the essential is done. It hasn't rained much all day. Only a few short showers now and then, so even though I now know the underlying problem is not solved, we won't get flooded again during this typhoon.

Cho will be pleased when she arrives a bit later. At least everything is as dry as can be for the time being.

The plumber has not come yet, though. I wait for him.

Assessing long term prospects

At 8pm, the plumber finally arrives. He tests the drains by filling our bathtub with water and then emptying it. The water drains normally. The plumber cannot do more than he already did the previous day. We noticed that besides water, a lot of sand was spurted up from the drain. Together, we go to the roof to see the situation there, but the roof is fairly clean. We go to the basement, to see where the pipes go. We find the one corresponding to our bathroom drain. He taps at several places on the pipe but does not find anything that is obviously wrong, besides the fact that the pipes are obviously not suited to handle such amount of record rainfall.

The only thing I know is that it's only a matter of time before the same flooding will occur again. Torrential rains are very common in Taiwan, from the spring to late fall, either brought by the rain season is spring or by typhoons troughout the season. With this whole Global Warming and Climate Change business, such record downpour may well become ordinary. So, if nothing is done, I can expect the whole office space to be flooded again at every typhoon. And what if I go abroad for a month? The office gets flooded the first week and the water sits there for another three weeks???

The manager is not working on the weekend. This typhoon seems to be definitely out. Monday, I'll have to start seeing about a long term solution.

Rest

Sunday, the 20th of July, 2008.

I wake up very early, but forces myself to go back to sleep. I want some rest. I finally get up late, around 9am. I have no class today. I still go back to the office, as usual.

I guess that the electrical cables are dry enough now so that I can replug them. This time, I make sure no plug is lying on the floor. By default, everything should at least be 10 centimeters above the ground. I place the trailing plugs on the desk, at the back.

Soon, I am back online. I download my mail. I notice that, thankfully, nobody noticed my absence or got worried. Well, at least one person in the world must have noticed, but he was discreet and kind enough not to inquire, trusting I must have had a good reason to leave him in stitch in the middle of an important site upgrade. A good reason indeed!

I receive an email from a French friend who lives in the same city quarter. The three floors of his house got flooded because the drain pipe of the top floor balcony was blocked. He says he cleaned it all in 4 hours. Lucky guy!

I quickly reply to some Drupal issues, where my feedback is required. But I feel tired. I want to have lunch with Cho. I power off the computer intending to come back in the afternoon. I won't. After lunch, I'll prefer going back home and sleep the stress off.

A new beginning... waiting for the same to happen again

Monday, the 21st of July, 2008.

Today is another busy day. In the afternoon, I have to make up the Saturday class that I cancelled, in addition to my evening classes. Besides, my whole body aches from the forced exercise a couple of days earlier.

In the morning I see the manager who pays me back the plumber's fee. He also assures me that the contracted community plumbing business will come this week and make a full inspection, both to find a long term solution to the inner yard flooding and to the flooding in my own office. I show him what the plumber had shown me Saturday.

Well, that's at least reassuring. I won't have to fight it. They are not going to hide behind some "we can't do anything about it, it's a 100 year record precipitation, it won't happen again". They recognize their responsibility to find a long term solution.

Between my classes, I start laying the papers that got wet on the now dry floor.

Global perspective

As mentioned at the beginning, as I got news of heavy flooding in various parts of the world (recently in Iowa and the American mid-west, much more tragically and a bit earlier in Burma - Myanmar - where hundreds of thousands died...), I always thought that anything could befall me, but that I would be spared that particular plight.

Well, I was wrong.

Still and very importantly, throughout this most inconvenient episode, even though I felt at times tired and cranky, I was aware that I was very lucky. As I said, on the same day and in the same city, 19 people died. Hundreds of houses were flooded beyond repair, etc.

And again, even all this pales in comparison to the absolute disaster that killed so many Burmese people.

Today, Tuesday, I feel happy and very lucky. I made this account just like I would make an account of another adventure I might have, for the record and to inform friends and family.

What I am very serious about is finding long term solutions to such so-called "natural" disasters around the world.

So I would like to invite you to join me in finding and implementing solutions to known problems, making informative activist videos and promoting systemic changes in our electoral system so that we can finally elect responsible politicians who will at last face those pressing challenges.

Epilogue

Monday evening, Cho told me that the weather report has announced a weather formation that could turn into a new typhoon that could hit us by next Saturday... It's too early for any large scale plumbing work to have been done. I'll probably have to sleep in the office, so that I can bail water out through the toilet before it flows out of the bathroom, if it comes to that...