If you're a member of a stadium-filling middle-aged American rock band, you must be slowly waking up to the fact that God hates you.

That's the only way we can explain why a series of Biblical plague-style accidents keep wrecking their homes, anyway. Just weeks after Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers' house burnt down in the Malibu wildfires, Eddie Van Halen's house has got all muddy because a water main freakishly broke near his house yesterday. Actually it's a little more serious than we're making out – thousands of gallons of water uprooted trees in Eddie Van Halen's garden, filled over his swimming pool and narrowly avoided causing permanent damage to his house.

Memo to God: when you get round to unleashing your plague of unhealable boils, might we suggest Bon Jovi as a target. Again, that's Bon Jovi.

These days, Eddie Van Halen never does anything more strenuous than seeing how girly he can let his hair get before anyone confronts him about it or choosing theoretical new Van Halen line-ups by throwing darts into a phonebook blindfolded. So with this in mind, Eddie van Halen has had a hell of a year.

First Van Halen were going into the Rock And Roll Hall OF Fame, then hardly any of the band turned up because Eddie went to rehab, then they managed to split up before they even reformed, and then they decided to reform anyway. And the last thing anyone wants after a year like that is an unusual amount of mud in their back garden.

But that's what Eddie Van Halen has to deal with today, after a water main burst near his home in LA yesterday and sent thousands of gallons of mud and debris crashing down Coldwater Canyon and into his garden, not affecting anyone else's property. Although neither Eddie Van Halen or his girlfriend were at home when the mud-attack hit, Van Halen's girlfriend Janie Liszewski – who also moonlights as his publicist – had this to say:

"It could have been a lot worse. The pool is buried in mud, the driveway gate is down and some major landscaping is going to be needed to restore the yard to its former self."

It's also been reported that the only thing which saved Eddie Van Halen's house from the accident was the quick-thinking firefighters who threw down sandbags to protect it. But coming so soon after Flea's house burnt down in a freak Malibu wildfire, how are these under-fire celebrities going to protect themselves from the cruel hand of Mother Nature?

We think we have an answer, and that answer is a man-for-man population swap with Basildon. It's so obviously – Basildon has everything that the modern millionaire celebrity needs, from plans to build one of Europe's largest wetland nature reserves to a shopping centre with a Claire's Accessories and a Bon Marche. Plus the current population of Basildon would get to go to LA and have their houses burnt down by a succession of natural disasters. We wouldn't be against that, to be honest.

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Eddie Van Halen's Yard Flooded - Associated Press