'I'm devastated. We'd just moved in'

JUST NINE weeks after laying €4,500 worth of walnut on his family’s kitchen floor, James Hamilton was yesterday taking it all back up.

“I’m going to have to dry it out and if possible lay it down again. We can’t afford to replace it. We’re going to need a new washing machine and a new fridge too. And I’ve no insurance for this because we can’t get flood insurance for the houses here.”

Living on Pearse Square, a Georgian square of two-storey overbasement houses off Dublin’s Pearse Street, he says flooding has been a regular event since the adjacent development of Grand Canal Square, by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA).

“Before that area was developed it was owned by the gasworks and there was coal and slagheaps. When it rained it held the water.

“Now it’s all paved, the water has nowhere to go, so it all flows down to us. It is 16 feet higher there than we are here.”

He said the drains of the area were “antiquated” and unable to cope with the additional pressure created by more than 4,000 new apartments, as well as businesses, around Grand Canal Square. “They spent millions on all the new buildings and not a fiver on the drains.”

Water and sewage started seeping into the Hamiltons’ basement, he said, at about 7.30pm on Monday after manholes and shores on the street outside overflowed.

A spokeswoman for the DDDA said the drainage system around Grand Canal Square flowed “directly into the Liffey”, and did not have an impact on the adjoining Dublin City Council-maintained drains.

Across the square, Mary Aherne (77), described what had happened in her house as “deeply upsetting”. Living alone, she was with four neighbours – young women – yesterday, laying sheets of newspaper over the wet, dirty stone floor in the basement.

“It has flooded before but this is the worst I have ever seen it,” she said. “I have been living here since the 1960s. I was sitting here last night after my stew; was reading away happily when I felt water around my toes. It wasn’t until I looked down it registered that it was a flood, and it was everywhere.

“I was mopping and clearing and moving things,” she said. “I lay down eventually, in my clothes at about half past twelve.”

Alice Bregazzi, of the nearby St Andrew’s Resource Centre, yesterday organised for a meal-on-wheels to be delivered to Ms Aherne.

In nearby Irishtown, a number of homes were flooded in Stella Gardens, including that of Bren Heyes, his partner Audrey Joyce and their two children, who had moved in four months ago.

The new floor in the living room, as well as an Xbox game console and a new 40-inch television had been damaged by water that seeped up through the floors from about 9pm on Monday.

“We had to move everything out of here,” said Ms Joyce, standing in the now empty livingroom. “We had about 15 neighbours in here with towels mopping it up, passing the towels out, ringing them out and passing them back in.

“The floors are going to have to be taken up. You can hear the boards squelching under us. I’m just happy it has stopped raining,” said Ms Joyce.

“I’m devastated,” said Mr Heyes. “We’d just moved in. We were just about ready to start on it being a home.”

Neighbours Janet and Thomas Finnegan, who had completely refurbished their home after the major floods of February 2002, had “about 20 people in mopping” on Monday evening as water flowed in through the front door.

“Every time a car passed through the floods on the main road, they sent waves of water down here,” said Mr Finnegan.

“It didn’t stop until about 1am. We were mopping until about four this morning.

“The bedroom floors will have to be replaced and the built-in wardrobes, and shoes and clothes. Sure that’s sewage that was in here. You couldn’t wear anything it touched again.”