Residents of the Waterways estate are in a state of disbelief over the dramatic flooding of their homes
ALL DAY yesterday, small groups of shocked residents of the Waterways development in Sallins, Co Kildare, stood staring disbelievingly across waist-high water at the homes they had been forced to abandon on Sunday.
“Our two cars are back there, in the end row of houses,” said Karen Dunne dazedly. “There was no time to move them, the water came up that fast.”
When Karen woke up on Sunday morning she saw the water was up to the level of the footpath. She didn’t worry. The same thing had happened in the estate a fortnight ago, and the water had receded overnight. This time, it did not.
By the time her partner, Gary Behan, returned shortly afterwards with sandbags as a precaution, the water was coming into their home through the walls.
“I had the front door closed, but the water was still coming in.”
In 15 minutes, the water was creeping to the second step of their stairs. They fled on foot.
“I had to throw out my clothes afterwards. They stank of sewage,” she said.
The Waterways development, clearly visible from the nearby railway line, is a mix of about 100 apartments, duplexes and two- storey houses. Nobody yesterday seemed to know why the estate, formerly a pitch and putt area, had flooded so badly. It appears a culvert got blocked, nearby streams flooded, and the bowl-like space of the development filled rapidly, with nowhere for the excess water to drain naturally.
Lucas Wajda stood at the edge of the flood with his arm around his stricken-looking wife, Anna, who had been crying. They were waiting for their turn in the Civil Defence-manned rescue boat to return briefly to their home for a few possessions.
“We only bought our house in August,” she gulped. “We moved in on August 25th. It was €240,000 and we thought we were getting a bargain, but now I see it actually wasn’t.”
Lucas spent a short time moving furniture on Sunday morning, “but the couches were too heavy to move upstairs, so we had to put them up on tables”.
Then they took their 17-month-old baby, Antonina, and a change of clothes for them all, and ran. “We thought the water would go down and we could move back today,” he said.
Like many other residents, the Wajdas only took things for one night, thinking they would be back the next day. Yesterday, the word on the estate was that it could be at least three months before the place is habitable.
Rebecca and Ambrose Finnerty bought their three-bedroom house two years ago. Rebecca was in Carlingford for a hen weekend and the first she knew about the flooding was when her husband rang her at 11am on Sunday to tell her he had been moving furniture all morning. “I haven’t stopped crying since,” she confessed.
“We only got married in August, and all our wedding presents are in that house. My wedding dress. Everything. I know it’s only stuff, and we’re lucky nobody is hurt, but it’s still not easy: it’s our stuff. And now I keep thinking, if we do up our house and fix everything, how are we to know it won’t happen again?”
This was a question nobody could answer yesterday. From the vantage point of the rescue boat, you could see furniture piled up on tables against windows inside homes, curtains tied up, toys floating. One resident was carried into her house for 15 minutes to fetch some clothes. When the door of her ground-floor apartment was opened, the water was at the level of the radiator. Outside, wheelie bins bobbed up and down, as did window boxes. Cars sat in water up to their windows.
Some people returned to their homes for clothes, laptops and push-chairs. Lorraine Clair’s main priority was to rescue her two goldfish, Rex and Wheeler. “I got my dog and cat out already, and I came back for my fish today. I couldn’t have left them there.”