Les Égâts d'Eaux

Water Damage!

When Carolyn and I finally arrived in Montpellier on Thursday night, the apartment was musty. I attributed the stale smell to a lack of ventilation, after all we’re in an old building with stone walls and our windows and exterior shutters had been closed for the last three months.

On Friday morning Carolyn warily showed me a large water stain in the plaster ceiling and stone wall of (what we are calling) the music room. There’s a makeshift fiberboard enclosure for our water heater in this room and it also had stains and streaks from water running down its sides. The wood floor in that corner had water stains and felt a little springy, as though the subfloor had begun to warp. Carolyn had noticed the damage Thursday night and had wisely decided not to tell me until morning. She knew I wouldn’t sleep at all if I saw evidence of a leak at bedtime.

Water stains on our ceiling and stone wall, the mirror is part of the enclosure that surrounds our hot water heater.

At first look, it appeared that the water was coming from a cast iron drain pipe, though the problem could just as easily have been an overflowed sink or bathtub from the apartment above. It was impossible to be certain about the provenance of this problem without a proper investigation.

My nightmare of a Frenchman bathing carelessly in the upstairs apartment.

I took pictures on Friday, annotated them, and found the contact information for our insurance company and Trustee (that’s what they call a building management company here). I emailed both companies. I was sure they’d get back to us quickly since the leak might be active and the damage was only going to get worse! Nobody replied on Monday. Nobody replied on Tuesday.

After 48 hours, frustrated with a complete lack of response from our insurance company, I went to their website and started translating everything. It turns out there’s a procedure to follow (of course there is. This is France!) The first step is to fill out a form called Constat Amiable Égâts des Eaux (the Amicable Report of Water Damage) which is an oxymoron of I ever heard one.

At least my bicycle was outside the flood area and didn’t get wet.

This form documents the nature of the damage, and where the leak originated (and therefore whose insurance is responsible). There was a dire warning on our insurance company’s website: the CAEE cannot be edited once signed, so be sure all the information is correct! The form has space for information about our apartment, the adjacent apartment, and a few other questions: Is the space intended for residential use? Are you a renter?

Using Google translate, I also wrote a letter in French to the gentleman, M. Traig, who lives above us. The letter explained the water damage in our apartment, asked if he had suffered any instances of overflowing sinks or tubs, and attempted to reassure him that our goal was simply to fix the damage and that we wanted to have a good relationship with all of our neighbors. I invited M. Traig to come to our apartment at his convenience to view the damage.

Finally, on Wednesday afternoon, I got an email from the trustee: “We usually hire Company X to do leak investigations. You should contact your insurance company.” I replied immediately. “Thank you for your reply. To clarify, are you saying you have hired Company X and they are going to conduct a leak investigation?” I have not received any reply as of this writing, five days later.

Water damage is such a common problem in the old French cities that they have a standardized form to report incidents.

I reached out to our real estate agent (and now friend) Agnès who had been checking in on the apartment for us while we were out of town. I sent her copies of the paperwork and photographs. Agnès replied quickly saying she had been in the apartment about two weeks earlier and hadn’t noticed any damage but allowed that she might have missed it (the apartment was dark with all the exterior shutters closed. Even with lights turned on the damage would not have been easy to spot).

On Thursday Carolyn managed to get someone from our insurance company on the phone. She made them repeat themselves a few times in French but she got the gist: “This isn’t our problem. You should contact the insurance company for the people above you who caused the leak, or the building’s insurance company.” (The building’s insurance would be responsible if the leak came from a commonly owned pipe.) When we bought the apartment the previous owner was working with the building management to repair minor water damage from a leaking drain pipe in a different area of the same room. Naturally, we suspected the new damage might be related to the previous problem even though it’s ten feet away.

While Carolyn was on the phone with the insurance company, I received an email response from our insurance agent! “My colleague will call you today and explain how we handle these situations.” (I’m making my final edits to this post on Monday morning and the colleague has still not contacted us.)

We took Agnès to dinner on Thursday night to catch up (she recently celebrated a milestone birthday); we wanted details of her daughter’s internship in Dubai, and of the kitten she had adopted last spring.

Agnés’s kitten is all grown up now. This image is from last spring.

Of course we also discussed the water damage. I was steamed that everyone was moving so slowly.

“This is bullshit, should I just hire a lawyer?!”

Agnès laughed at that and took a drag on her cigarette. “No, the way to get things done in France is to just keep calling every day.” She offered to call on our behalf and also let us know that our neighbor upstairs was probably out of town and that’s why he hadn’t responded yet to our letter. “He’s a doctor and does a lot of work in Africa. He probably hasn’t seen your letter yet.”

I told her that in the US our insurance company would take care of our damage immediately and then they would work things out with the neighbor’s insurance company. That way we’re not living in a dank apartment with damage getting worse while everyone tries to figure out who’s responsible. “Well, wouldn’t THAT make sense!” Agnès said agreeably.

Friday night we had dinner with a couple we had befriended on our last visit. They laughed at me suggesting we might need a lawyer after only three days of inaction. “These are old cities with old buildings and old pipes—this happens all the time. You just need to get used to the way the French do things.” These statements were followed up with the usual clichés about life in France vs. life in the US, the most salient of which is something like: in France they work to live, in the US you live to work.

I don’t actually need a French lawyer…yet.

They were right. I need to get used to the way things are done here. I do have a bias towards urgency after a life spent living in the US and working for demanding clients. It serves me well in the US but is out of step with the way things are done here. I have been thinking a lot about my expectations and trying to adjust them to the customs in my new home. Now that I understand that we aren’t being treated differently than anyone else, the sting has been taken out of the glacial responses; for now I’ll resist the urge to roll up my sleeves and fix everything myself.