I live in Auckland, New Zealand and had never been in a flood until 2023. We got something like 280mm in a 24 hours, on the back of a wet month. At its peak we we getting 50mm an hour.

It was incredible. Manhole covers popping off, mildly sloped roads were rivers with rapids and flat ones were lakes, growing as you watched.

Caught completely unprepared, it was chaos.

Living near a river or flood-plain is a hard no for me, even if I had 3m thick stone walls.