1/4 Flooding in restaurant
Steef Blok was closer to crying than laughing on Monday. On Christmas Day, his restaurant, Het Wapen van Kaatsheuvel at EuroParcs, was completely flooded. And that while about two hundred guests were coming to eat. “Then you don’t know what to do anymore.”
Owner Steef Blok watches helplessly as the fire brigade pumps liters of water from his restaurant. He had imagined this Christmas day very differently. “I enjoyed Christmas breakfast at home. Then I went to the restaurant to prepare everything for Christmas brunch and dinner,” he says. “But then things went completely wrong. I saw that there was some water in the restaurant and went to get a vacuum cleaner. When I came back, the entire restaurant was already under water, half a meter high. Then you don’t know what to do anymore. doing.”
“Everyone has come to help, which I think is great.”
The fact that this happens on Christmas Day causes a lot of stress. “Eighty guests would come for brunch. More than a hundred people would come for dinner in the evening.” The brunch could still be moved to another restaurant at the holiday park. That was not possible for the Christmas dinner, as the room was already fully booked.
And so it was all hands on deck to get the restaurant dry and clean in time. “Everyone came to help. The fire brigade, people from the municipality, neighbors and many colleagues. A special company has cleaned everything hygienically again. I think that’s great and I’m incredibly happy about that.”
The cause of all the misery turned out to be a broken pump. “We are in a low area, which is why there are all kinds of pumps in the area. One of those pumps stopped working. As a result, the sewer was not emptied and it ended up in our toilets and drains,” Steef explains. .
“The entire site was flooded, the water was up to the seats of the chairs.”
Steef describes with resignation how his restaurant looked at the beginning of the afternoon. “The entire site was flooded. The water was up to the seats of the chairs. The supplies we had here were destroyed. In the adjacent indoor playground, the water rose to a meter high. So we suffered enormous damage. But that’s what we see. We will do that later, the most important thing is that people can still eat their Christmas dinner here.”
And that was achieved with a lot of hard work. Miraculously, the restaurant is dry and clean on time. There is great relief among the staff. While dancing and singing, the chairs are put back in place and the tables are set. Steef is also visible that the Christmas dinner can still go ahead. Although this day has had a big impact. “I’m going to sit on the couch tonight with a beer and do nothing, except watch a nice bad Christmas movie.”
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