Welcome To Hellville - Part 1 (1/2) By Rich Mills

Next Page, Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

After recent heavy rains I'm now trapped in the flat. The Wet Season is fully upon us now, it seems to arrive earlier each year. Not that I'd mind tropical storms if we got the tropical summer to go with it. Instead this summer was cold and grim, as it has been since as long as I can remember. My Dad does talk about when he was a lad and the summers were long and hot. He says that there was even a drought when he was about 6, some 64 years ago. I'm so glad that I live in an upstairs flat here, as I'd be somewhat pissed off if my place flooded every year like the one downstairs does.

It's bad enough having to wade through a metre of stinking sewer water to clamber onto the water taxi that takes me to the local café bars complex each evening, never mind having to evacuate your home for 2 months every year.

At least I have a home still, unlike many of the inhabitants of Hellville, who have lost everything. Year by year now, despite the pathetic efforts of the Northern Metropolitan Parliament to throw up desperately inadequate flood defences, people are loosing everything they own.

It's sad really to see the swelling refugee camps growing along the M62. People with nothing left and no hopes for the future. The State compensation ran out about 20 years ago, and insurance corporations stopped insuring people against flood damage long before that. Areas of land inhabited for hundreds if not thousands of years lost to the sea forever.

Hard to believe now that it wasn't that many years ago that Hellville had streets rather than canals. Homes that once sat on the ground, rather than on huge stilts. Why people still insist on living here is just madness. I mean as soon as I can raise the funds I'm out of this shit-hole. Going to find myself some higher ground in a country that isn't so fucked-up.

It isn't just Hellville that has these problems. The same thing is going on all over the country, as the waters eat away at the coastline. It will not be long before all that is left is what used to be known as the higher ground. The kind of places that were once only inhabited by sheep, craggy faced farmers and woolly jumper wearing ramblers, now packed mile after mile by port-a-cabins, tents and flood rescued caravans.

Shanty towns built out of water damaged MDF and Ikea Corporation flat-packed furniture that floated away from the vast warehouse that once existed on the outskirts of the island city of Leaks. Quite prophetic really that all that will be sticking out of the swelling ocean around us will be the very backbone of the country.

The never give-up quality that this country's inhabitants still seems to have, is no longer a positive quality, it's just the last cries of a dying breed. Give it up, and get out of here. Run, swim, fly, just get out of here and don't look back! That's what I say. But then again it's easy for me to say such things, I'm young enough and fit enough to do something about it. I do feel so sad for the refugees, especially the large number of elderly ones, fighting it out on what will soon be a small strip of land too small to hold them all.

There's a phrase my Dad still uses, This country is going to the dogs! Well now that is no longer the case, it's going to the fish. Well not even to the fish really, seeing how there aren't many fish left in the waters around us these days. Depleted fish stocks were an issue before I was born my Dad says. Then things got a bit better as warm water fish migrated up north back at the beginning of the century. However, as the floods became a major problem to food production in the country, fish was one of the only country's sources of natural protein based food that wasn't synthetically produced in factory-labs.

Loosened, last hope, legislation meant that anyone and everyone with a boat was out there grabbing what they could. Hellville almost had a fishing industry again for a short while.

Exponential increases in sea temperatures, and unstoppable pollution coming off the flood-plains soon put a stop to that. The amount of contaminants that bled into the waters around the country from the years of landfill that were now been washed away into the sea was frightening.

Continued Welcome To Hellville - Part 1 By Rich Mills.. Next Page

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