At 7:00 am one rainy morning last September in London, David Benqué heard and smelled sewage gushing through his apartment windows. David recounted to me how he quickly woke his partner, Claire, and their two children. He grabbed their five-year-old while Claire gathered their three-year-old along with the children’s favorite teddy bears, and the family waded through the already waist-high toxic flood.

By the time Claire got to the door, the flow of sewage was too strong for her and the toddler to move through the gushing current, so David stood in his flooded courtyard, yelling to the firefighters on the scene to help get them out. Within twenty minutes the entire apartment, along with two adjoining apartments and the courtyard outside, were filled with raw sewage.

The family spent several weeks staying at their landlord’s apartment until they found new housing. Nearly everything they owned was destroyed, and the only home their children had known was rendered uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. They’ve since spent tens of thousands of dollars on housing, supplies, and the removal of their destroyed belongings. Their young children are still traumatized by the “poo water” that destroyed everything they knew in a matter of a minutes, frequently playing “flood” with their new PLAYMOBIL home by repeatedly taking out all the furniture and wiping it down.