How to prepare your home for a flood

In order to prepare your home for flooding, there are three key steps you should take. Firstly, you need to understand your flood risk. If a flood risk is present, you should sign up for flood warnings to ensure you find out as early as possible if there is risk of flooding at your home location. Finally, protect your property to ensure that flooding causes minimal damage. This will mean you can return to your property much faster after you have been flooded.

Please select a section below:

Understand your flood risk

Sign up for flood warnings

Protect your home

Further support

 

 


Understand your flood risk

  • Find out your flood risk
  • If your home is at risk, make a flood plan
  • If your home is at risk, sign up for EA Flood Warnings by phone/text and check the online flood warnings regularly. Sign up for free text or email alerts – from the EA or SEPA – if your home is at risk of flooding. For England and Wales flood alerts, please click here. For flood alerts in Scotland, please click here. If you prefer to sign up by phone (rather than online) call Floodline on 0345 988 1188.
  • Knowyourfloodrisk.co.uk have produced this additional guide on how to protect your home.

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Receive free flood warnings

Real-time flood warnings can be found online for EnglandWales and Scotland. These highlight the locations of each warning, the water course that is affected and the severity of the warning at the given location. There are three severity levels for these alerts:

    1. Alert
      This is the lowest level of flood alert. Simply check your home flood plan / flood kit and continue to monitor for further warnings.
    2. Warning
      The second level of the online flood warning system. Upon receiving this warning in your area, you should ensure all defences are in place on the property and move valuables to a safe place where they will not be affected by floodwater.
    3. Severe Warning
      If a severe warning has been placed on your home, there is a significant threat to human life. In this circumstance, it is advised that you evacuate the property immediately and move to higher ground. Remember you can call 999 if there is any danger to human life.

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Protect your home

  • Make sure that you have full home flood cover on your buildings/contents insurance.
  • Keep on top of basic maintenance work that keeps your home watertight (or encourage your landlord to do so if this type of work is covered by them). Repair the seals between the window and door frames and brickwork and ensure there are no gaps. Repoint the external brickwork, if this is damaged. Age often leads to cracks, sections dropping away and greater porosity. Repointing will correct these defects.
  • Consider putting in flood resistance measures or flood resilience measures.
    Knowyourfloodrisk.co.uk have created this useful infographic to show some of the measures you can take to protect your home.

See the video below for information on how to protect your home from flooding.

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Further support

Flood forums can offer a wide range of additional advice and support:

  • National Flood Forum – independent charity organisation that works alongside flood affected communities nationally within the UK, to deal with the impacts and challenges of flooding
  • Scottish Flood Forum – A network of community flood resilience groups, providing information, training and support for flood-affected communities in Scotland.
  • Knowyourfloodrisk.co.uk Homeowners Guide – A free guidance document providing a range of useful information about a whole range of aspects directly relevant to householders.
  • Property Protection Advisor tool – This tool can provide a free cost estimation for property flood resilience measures on properties in the UK. This will give a printable report based on construction attributes of your property.

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