It seems hard to believe that we’re still talking about the floods in the south of the UK in the second week in February, but talk about it we are. We have all seen for ourselves on television and the internet the absolutely devastating pictures of flooding in the south of the UK. The new areas of concern are now pretty much every town and village that are on the banks of the river Thames. Villages down there now look like they are actually surrounded by the sea, the flooding is that extensive. On a personal note, I have genuinely never seen weather like this, certainly not flooding like this, and I live in the grim North!

Mark Warren was posing the question on Twitter earlier today if installers have been affected by the flooding. I think it would be fair to say that they have. It would be hard to imagine businesses of all types that would be unaffected by this extreme weather, fenestration or otherwise. We have seen endless miles of coastline battered with shop fronts usually being the main casualty. Not only that, but riverside pubs under water, sports fields turned into lakes and roads turned into water skiing runs.

But the damage runs far beyond the physical damage done to property and belongings. Whilst towns and villages try desperately to cope with biblical amounts of water, there will come a time once the water recedes where people will start the recovery and repairs. It is during this time, and of course now whilst the water is still here, where the demand for windows and doors will be simply zero. There are far more important issue at hand now and there are parts of our industry which may have to get used to the fact that demand for new windows will go down and stay down for quite a while.

This situation will be highly frustrating for many fenestration businesses in the south of the UK that would have been looking forward to a positive start t0 2014, when instead they are watching their surrounding areas suffer from the worst of the extreme weather. For those a little further north who have escaped the worst of the weather, we should bear in mind that not all areas will be enjoying the boost in business. It’s easy for companies, including the one I work for, to forget that others have had a lot of difficulties so far this year.

If you have had problems with flooding and storms so far this year, I genuinely wish you all the very best for the rest of the year and that the waters recede as quickly as possible. It’s never nice to see the suffering that people are going through right now. Lets all hope that these events really give the Government a kick up the backside and pump some real investment into new and robust flood protection and storm defences.