Lift, Bag, Photograph: The 45-Minute Flood Drill for Hull Homes

There's a particular sound in Hull when the water gets ideas. Not a roar — more a low, steady gurgle from the drain at the bottom of the street, plus the clatter of someone two doors down moving their wheelie bin onto the pavement.

Most households round here have a rough plan for the water itself. Very few have a plan for the tech. And that's the bit that stings afterwards: the laptop with years of photos on it, the router sitting on the floor in the back room, the extension lead stretched across a damp carpet.

So here's a drill you can run on an ordinary dry Tuesday evening in about three-quarters of an hour. No sandbags, no shopping trip, nothing that costs more than a couple of zip-lock bags.

Why rehearse something that might never happen

Because when an Environment Agency warning actually lands for the Humber or one of the drains, you get maybe an hour of clear thinking. Everything after that is adrenaline and improvisation. Running it once in advance means your hands already know where the router's plug is, which drawer the passports live in, and where the power bank was last seen.

It also means the boring job — the backup — gets done on a night when the broadband is fine.

Minutes 0–10: back up the stuff you'd actually cry about

Start with the phone. Photos, mostly. Open your cloud app and check that it's genuinely finished uploading rather than sitting at 60% with a little spinning circle. Do the same for the laptop: OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud for Windows, whatever you use.

One rule for the drill: don't attempt a monster backup during a real warning. Four hundred gigabytes will not upload before the water reaches the step. That job belongs to tonight, not to the emergency.

If your passwords live in a notebook rather than a password manager, photograph the relevant page now and let it sync. It's crude, but it works.

Minutes 10–20: get everything up off the floor

In Hull, water usually arrives as an inch rather than a metre. An inch is still plenty to kill a laptop power brick, a games console, a soundbar, an extension lead, a router, and anything with a fan at the bottom of it.

Walk the house with that in mind. Anything plugged in below knee height goes up. The KCOM router can be lifted onto a shelf — the little ONT box on the wall can't move, but you can unplug the cables and relocate the router itself. Mesh nodes, the smart speaker in the kitchen, the console under the telly, the tower PC in the back room: all of it upwards.

Then deal with the cables. Coil them, hang them, or dump them in a box on a table. Water plus 240 volts is what turns a soggy evening into a dangerous one, and a trailing extension lead lying on a wet floor is precisely the thing you don't want while the power is still on.

Minutes 20–30: bag it and label it

You don't need specialist kit. A couple of big zip-lock bags, a dry bag from a camping trip, or a bin liner inside another bin liner will do the job.

Into the bag: phone, charger, power bank, any hearing aids, the folder of documents nobody looks at until the night they desperately need it, and a marker pen if there's one in the drawer.

Label the bag. Not for your benefit — for whoever is helping you at eleven o'clock at night.

Worth remembering: a phone sealed inside a bag still responds to touch and still takes calls, roughly. Not perfectly, but well enough.

Minutes 30–40: power and light

Work on the assumption that the electricity goes off and the mobile signal gets patchy the moment the whole street starts streaming the local news.

Charge everything now, as part of the drill: phone, power bank, laptop, and the torch that nobody can ever find. Charge the power bank first — it's the one that gives you a second attempt at everything else.

Then put your fallback light somewhere you can reach in the dark without swearing. A head torch beats a phone torch because it leaves both hands free.

One small thing that pays off: screenshot the numbers that matter. Your insurer's claims line, the broadband support number, your own mobile number, next of kin. Saved offline. If the fibre goes down and the signal is grim, you do not want to be hunting for a number you can't load.

Minutes 40–45: the slow video your insurer will want

This is the step nearly everyone skips and nearly everyone regrets.

Walk round with your phone and film a slow, deliberately boring video of each room. Open the cupboards. Show the back of the telly, the sticker on the bottom of the laptop, the router, the console, the washing machine. Say the model out loud if it helps — the microphone will pick it up.

Serial numbers are the difference between a claim that sails through and one that limps along for weeks. Insurers want proof of ownership, and a clear photo of a sticker with a model number on it is exactly that proof.

Then email the video to yourself or drop it straight into the cloud. A video sitting on a phone that's about to go into a puddle is not a backup, it's a prop.

A few things not to do

Don't wrap the router in a bin bag and leave it plugged in. It will overheat, and you'll have made a bad situation worse.

Don't try to move a desktop tower by its cables.

Don't spend twenty minutes hunting for the ideal waterproof container. A carrier bag inside a carrier bag is fine. Really.

And don't assume the warning is aimed at somebody else. The 2007 floods and the 2013 tidal surge both caught plenty of people who were certain they lived on the high side of the street.

Once the water has gone

When the levels drop and the kettle goes back on, plug things in one at a time and give each one a minute before adding the next.

Anything that got wet while it was switched on stays off. Take it to a bench rather than switching it on to "see if it still works" — that single hopeful button press is how a forty-quid repair turns into a four-hundred-quid replacement.

Then, if you remember, run the drill again next autumn. Forty-five minutes once a year is a lot cheaper than a new laptop and a fortnight of arguing with an insurance form.