A family's £900,000 home is now 'worthless' after being flooded with raw sewage twice in three years.
Helen and Ashley Northway’s 17th century stone farmhouse was left overflowing with foul sewage after heavy rain swept across the UK last week.
But tragically this isn't the first time this has happened to the couple.
The childhood sweethearts snapped up the property in Raunds, Northamptonshire, in 2017, and spent £200,000 converting it into a family home - including building a full-equipped annexe for Helen’s grandmother.
They hoped the property would be an investment for their children when they grew up but now say it is “worthless” as they can’t insure it against future floods, or sell it.
Recruitment manager Helen, 42, said: “Before we bought the house, there had been two floods in 100 years but since we moved in, there have been two in three years.
“Every time it rains, we know we are at serious risk of being flooded out. It means we cannot leave the house.
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“We have had to cancel holidays, attending funerals, even our honeymoon was cut short so we could come back and pump out water.
"Whenever we go out we are glued to the weather forecast in case it rains.
“We have spent a lot of money converting the house and what we have now is a nigh on £1million house which we were hoping to leave to our children but is now a massive life-long problem.”
She added: "During the latest floods, my grandmother was so distressed she was crying and crying and saying ‘I want to be dead, I want to be dead’.
"It’s horrific. There’s a threat to human health – mental and physical.
“We are uninsurable for floods now. The house has been valued at between £850,000 and £900,000 but it's worthless now.
"We’ve worked all our lives, my husband has served the country but what are our children going to be left with?”
Alongside flooding recently, back on Christmas Eve 2020, the family were caught in a desperate race against time to save their presents, and valuables after the entire ground floor was left 3ft underwater.
Due to bad drainage and a faulty sewage pipe, foul waste swept into the house, leaving the family with a huge clean-up bill.
The couple complained to Northamptonshire Highways and engineers repaired misconnected sewage pipes and built two soakaways to absorb surface water at a cost of £230,000 in 2021.
But despite this, just over two years later, the family’s property was once again submerged and flooded with sewage.
After being exposed to raw sewage most recently, the couple, their 10-month-old daughter Evelyn, 10-year-old disabled son Archie and Helen’s 89-year-old grandmother June, all fell ill.
Recruitment manager Helen, 42, said: “We are all very sick now.
“All five members of my household had to be assessed by an emergency doctor and prescribed antibiotics for chest infections, following exposure to the raw sewage, and thereafter chemicals to treat it.
"My husband has been coughing up blood.
"With vulnerable people including my elderly grandmother and young baby being affected with chest infections, I am not willing to allow this to drag on as there is serious risk to health, let alone the property damage.”
The family had installed flood defences at their home, used pumps and put up barriers over doors and windows but found none of them worked.
Since the road repairs were carried out the family have also called out the fire service to pump water from the street outside their home into the nearby brook multiple times.
Helen added: “We’ve had Drainline come in excess of 20 times in the last year.
“It takes them two hours and I estimate it costs £2,000 a time coming out of taxpayers’ money.
“The flooding is worse than it’s ever been. This has been the worst since the Christmas floods.
Helen has also claimed that a new 400-home development built nearby has increased pressure on the drains and made things worse.
Ashley, a veteran army bomb disposal expert, 43, who now works in a secondary school, said: "I’ve served all over the world but I only have nightmares about the floods. It’s having an effect on us all."
The family have been in regular contact with Tom Pursglove, Conservative MP for Corby and East Northants.
He said: “Any new development must take flooding risk fully into account and any mitigation schemes must be sufficiently robust to address it.”
A North Northants Council spokesman said: “Investigations are ongoing due to the cause of flooding to the property.”
