Over here in the UK we are used to heavy bouts of rainfall. Heck it rains 200 days a year over here. But every now and then we get the rare but scary storm that puts us on our toes. Anyway to the story…
I work as a kitchen assistant at a really busy and popular restaurant in my hometown. I was walking to work this morning and could tell we were in for one hell of a bad storm. It was damp and gray but also hot and humid, a sure sign that it was going to thunder. When I started my shift all seemed fine at first and I didn’t think much when my workmates started talking about the sky getting very dark.
As expected it started to rain very hard. In wet conditions our number of customers tends to rise so we were not bothered. But when the thunder and lightning appeared the first bouts of anxiety began to occur. The rain was so heavy that within the hour the small courtyard just in front of the entrance to our restaurant began to flood. The small drain in the centre had been completely filled.
While I was working in the kitchen people suddenly started to panic. The waiting staff told us that the water was now spilling into the restaurant. Hearing a lot of commotion in the dining room, I decided to take a look and was horrified by what I saw. The courtyard was now an ankle high pool and the water was pouring underneath the glass doors like a miniature waterfall. The water had quickly spread into the dining room, forcing customers to abandon their tables and move further into the restaurant.
As the water began to flood into our tea and coffee-making section and the host’s podium, we realised we had no choice but to close the restaurant. We start calling in any available staff from the supermarket above us to assist in barricading the door. The scared and pissed off customers were evacuated just as the water began to seep into the kitchen. Just to make matters worse, the toilets began to back up and the lightning storm began to interfere with our mobile phone signals. This was bad for our staff members who lived near our local river bank who wanted to call home and see if they needed to prepare their homes for flooding.
We managed to barricade the doors with sacks of compost, but well over half the restaurant was now flooded with several inches of water. By this point I’m told to end my shift, and as I’m leaving some industrial cleaning people and plumbers are brought in to assist the remaining staff with mopping up our new swimming pool and unclogging the pipes. Many areas of my town are currently flooded and things are very chaotic at the moment. Talk about a freak of nature!
– Peace Lover
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