“We eat our dinner on the stairs,” screams Grandma, who has been forced to live upstairs for FOUR YEARS because the ground floor is flooded
A grandmother had to live on the upper floor of her house for four years because the ground floor had become too dangerous to live on due to rising water.
Elizabeth Rankin, 60, says she and her grandson Arlo, four, are crammed into a tiny room because the floor of their living room was torn up due to flooding.
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She is in dispute with Scottish Water over the cause of the flooding. The utility claims that the flooding was of natural origin, while she herself blames a burst pipe.
Elizabeth says an engineer analyzed the flow, but the energy giant says further tests are needed.
She told The Scottish Sun on Sunday: “We are stuck up there, living among toys and clothes. It is too dangerous to go down there.”
“We eat our dinner on the stairs.
“There are no floorboards and there are large puddles of water under the beams, all of which are rotting.
“I’m terrified that Arlo will fall down there and drown.
“It’s like nobody wants to help us.”
Laundromat owner Elizabeth, from Musselburgh in East Lothian, discovered the problem when she wanted to start work on a rear extension to her terraced house over a decade ago.
Knee-deep water has flooded the space beneath her home, where she has lived for 38 years, making it “freezing cold all year round and unbearable in winter.”
She tried to pump the water dry using two electric pumps that ran for up to six hours a day, but water kept coming back and she fears it will now cause damage to the building.
She has lived almost exclusively in the attic since 2020 and reports that mold is spreading on the upper floors.
Elizabeth, who was once trapped in the kitchen because the doorframe had swollen due to the humidity, suspects that the atmosphere aggravated Arlo’s asthma.
She doesn’t want to leave her home and knows she can’t sell it because of the problems.
Scottish Water said it was committed to investigating the “water intrusion” beneath Elizabeth’s home.
A spokesman said: “Our team has carried out extensive investigations and concluded that the water table at Pinkie Road is high and the properties were built on old mine workings.
“In other properties, the basement was sealed, which solved the problem.”
He said Scottish Water had offered to take a water sample to confirm the source, adding: “We have tried to arrange this with Ms Rankin.”
