If you have been affected by flooding, either because your home
has been flooded, or your water supply has been cut off, read our
tips on how to prepare food safely and what to do with garden
produce.
General tips
- Don't eat any food that has been touched or covered by
floodwater or sewage.
- Always wash your hands before preparing food.
- Clean and disinfect work surfaces, plates, pans, cutlery,
chopping boards etc. before using them with food. If you have a
working dishwasher, this is a more efficient way to clean and
sanitise smaller items. Or use a suitable disinfectant.
- Clean and disinfect the inside of your fridge and food
cupboards, if they have been touched by floodwater.
- Don't use work surfaces, plates etc. if they are badly chipped
or damaged.
- If tap water may be contaminated, boil and cool it before using
it to wash food that won't be cooked, such as fruit or salad.
- If your power has been cut off and your fridge has not been
working for a few hours, throw away the food inside. If your
freezer has not been working, throw away any meat, fish or dairy
products, or foods containing these, if they have started to get
soft. Also throw away any food that you would eat frozen, for
example ice cream.
- Store opened food in a box with a lid.
- Don't eat any food grown on an allotment that has been
flooded.
- If you have a catering business and have been affected by
flooding, ask for advice from the
Food and Safety Team.
Feeding babies
If your drinking water supply is either interrupted or
contaminated by the flooding and you need to prepare formula feed
for a baby, it is important to be careful with the water you use.
Here are some tips on preparing formula safely:
- Ideally use water from a bowser (a water tank provided by water
companies), or bottled water, brought to a ‘rolling’ boil and left
covered to cool for no more than half an hour, then follow the
manufacturer’s instructions on making up the feed. The use of
unboiled bowser water should be avoided.
- Use cooled boiled water or bottled water for cooling the feed
once it has been made up.
- Ready-to-feed liquid formula could be used instead.
- If there is no electricity or gas to allow boiling and you
don’t have ready-to-feed liquid formula available, bottled water
(table, spring or mineral water) can be used without boiling to
prepare baby feeds, but the prepared feed should then be used
immediately.
- Some bottled water labelled as 'natural mineral water' may have
high levels of sodium. When buying bottles of natural mineral
water, look at the label and check that the figure for sodium or
'Na' is not higher than 200mg a litre. If it is, then try to use
another water. If no other water is available, then use this water
for as short a time as possible.
Garden vegetable produce
Don't eat garden or allotment vegetables that have been covered
by sewerage or floodwater. Although any risk is small, it is better
to dispose of any contaminated produce and start
again.