What to watch out for in a flooded house
Just got word that my vacation house on the Mississippi gulf coast is still standing. Some of the windows and shingles and all are gone but it’s one of the few in the neighborhood that survived. I’m planning a trip down next week (I live in Colorado now) to secure it from weather and other uglies.
The problem is that reports have it that the house got at least three feet of water in it – that makes the storm surge at least 28 feet right there. The water’s gone but the mud and mold remain. What precautions should I take when cleaning up? I plan to just board it up for now until I can get a contractors time (probably a year or so). Any suggestions what I should do to save the little that’s left from mold and rot? The house is wood frame on piers.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions
Replies
If you do board it up, try to allow for as much air circulation as possible. Otherwise, the continued dampness will make whatever mold problem you may (er, will) have now much worse. Also, if you can, remove everything, such as upholstered furniture, drapes, carpet and drywall, that has become soaked prior to closing up the house.
Good luck.
Dry it out ASAP, if you have fiberglass insulation, the insulation will hold water untill it is removed. Water trapped under carpets and other containers and surfaces stays there.
To prevent mold and decay everything wet needs to be removed, clean surfaces with a bleach solution.
I would pay someone to immediately gut the place. Take out all furnishings, carpet, and rip open walls up to the water line. Scrape up the bulk of the mud.
If you let it sit for a year without doing this you might as well set fire to it.
Maybe I'm just dense but, how does anyone ....dry..... out anything where the humidity is 101% almost every day, ..........
It probably looks like a chia pet inside"
I think "drying out" is a relative term. Getting it as dry as possible and keeping it that way is my goal.
I can't in good conscience hire anyone to work on my vacation home when so many people are living in tents because their own homes are wrecked. I hear that the K-Mart parking lot down the road is still a tent city and labor is very hard to come by.
I plan to clean out all furniture and carpet and I'll rip open the walls as danH suggests. Thought I might take some bleach down and spray a solution on the floors and in the opened walls. Does anyone know what kind of mask is good to keep the mold out of your lungs?
Arrowpov, in the deep south a lot of older homes don't have insulation at all. For once i'm hoping this one doesn't.
Thanks for all the suggestions.
I THINK a standard dust mask will work for mold. The main thing is to try to avoid disturbing it more than necessary, and to get stuff out before the mold goes bananas.I think a borate solution is better than bleach for long-term control of mold -- bleach kills it but doesn't keep it from coming back. (Also helps control bugs.) There are other chemicals you can use, but many are pretty nasty.Saw holes (with a hole saw or sawzall) high and low (to promote ventillation) in any hollow area that you can't open fully. Cut holes in the heating ducts, etc.
I'd get a real half face respirator mask with some cartridges designed for organic vapors. You don't know what came in with the water. You probably don't want to know.Lots of bleach, fans and dehumidifiers.
I meant no disrespect, I would not know where to start something like what you now have to do !
Maybe kevlar gloves , disinfectant, eye drops, extra safety glasses/ goggles, razor blades (if you have to wear a mask)"
You may want to take a look at the Centers for Disease Control web page below, which briefly addresses mold issues and also has additional links to sites with information about cleaning up after flooding.
http://www.bt.cdc.gov/disasters/mold/protect.asp
You need to gut the house to the water line and let dry out. It may be too late already. Mold in houses in New Orleans is already to the ceiling (see pictures at NOLA.com).
Here's a picture of a fireman who got into his house very early with his buddies.You get out of life what you put into it......minus taxes.
Marv
The homes in NOLA are quite a bit worse, as the water stood there for weeks. A lot depends on how quickly the water came and went, and how badly polluted/muddy it was. I've seen cases where water came and went in a matter of 3-4 hours where even the TV sets survived (after a quick bath).
N-100 respirator is good for molds and other organisms. You would need a vapor respirator for and bleach or cleaning solvents.
bulldoser
Do you have any idea how long the water sat in your place?
I lived in Tulsa OK during a flash flood. The water was 2' high in my apartment for about 2 to 3 hours. The wood never did get completely soaked through and it didn't require all that much time to dry out. I know that they didnt tear any sheet rock out!
I also grew up in a small town in Iowa that flooded regularly, we had water in our house for 2 to 4 days. The floors were warped bad, we made relief cuts in them and nailed them back down. I remember tearing out plaster 3' high and letting it dry out for a week or two. Lucky for us, depending on how you look at it, the house was old and their wasn't any insulation in the walls so they dried out fairly fast.
I cant imagine just going down and spraying it with some bleach and boarding it up, if it doesn't dry out it will not be worth going back to .
Doug
There's a thread on the mold prevention in thread 59739.1 if you're looking for specific info on that aspect.
Do you have any insurance on the house? If so, see what they say before doing too much. The bulldozer idea may be the best solution in the end.
Here are a few pics of the aftermath in New Orleans and LafayetteI like your approach....now lets see your departure
A friend sent some pics from one of the rigs - this is post Katrina, not Rita.
View Image
Joe H
Edited 9/27/2005 11:25 pm ET by JoeH
I agree, it's probably a total. I'll just have to take a look. We have some insurance but not flood insurance. Even 2 blocks from the beach it wasn't considered a flood zone at 24 feet of elevation. I would guess that the insurance companies will be revising their flood maps after this one.
It looks like the water was in and out quickly - a couple of hours at most - so I'm hoping for the best. Leaving this weekend. I'll post a pic or two when I get back.
Thank you all for your help.
Insurance companies don't just revise flood maps. An extensive study is done and new maps are prepered. A letter of map amendment (LOMA) can be done for areas. The loma's usually are done to show a property is not in a hazard zone, but they can be done the other way.
LOMA's are not all that simple to do as many agencys get involved.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/27/D8CSPNVO1.html
Sep 27 3:22 PM US/Eastern
By JULIA SILVERMAN and MARILYNN MARCHIONE
Associated Press Writers
NEW ORLEANS
Wearing goggles, gloves, galoshes and a mask, Veronica Randazzo lasted only 10 minutes inside her home in St. Bernard Parish. Her eyes burned, her mouth filled with a salty taste and she felt nauseous. Her 26-year-old daughter, Alicia, also covered in gear, came out coughing.
"That mold," she said. "It smells like death."
Mold now forms an interior version of kudzu in the soggy South, posing health dangers that will make many homes tear-downs and will force schools and hospitals to do expensive repairs.
It's a problem that any homeowner who has ever had a flooded basement or a leaky roof has faced. But the magnitude of this problem leaves many storm victims prey to unscrupulous or incompetent remediators. Home test kits for mold, for example, are worthless, experts say.
Don't expect help from insurance companies, either. Most policies were revised in the last decade to exclude mold damage because of "sick building" lawsuits alleging illnesses. Although mold's danger to those with asthma or allergies is real, there's little or no science behind other claims, and a lot of hype.
"We went through a period when people were really irrational about the threat posed by the mere sight of mold in their homes," said Nicholas Money, a mold expert from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and author of "Carpet Monsters and Killer Spores," a book about mold.
"If you give me 10 minutes in anybody's home, I'll find mold growth somewhere," he said.
Mold is everywhere. Most people have no problem living with this ubiquitous fungus. It reproduces by making spores, which travel unseen through the air and grow on any moist surface, usually destroying it as the creeping crud grows.
Mold can't be eliminated but can be controlled by limiting moisture, which is exactly what couldn't be done after Hurricane Katrina. Standing water created ideal growth conditions and allowed mold to penetrate so deep that experts fear that even studs of many homes are saturated and unsalvageable.
In fact, New Orleans is where mold's health risks were first recognized.
A Louisiana State University allergist, the late Dr. John Salvaggio, described at medical meetings in the 1970s what he called "New Orleans asthma," an illness that filled hospital emergency rooms each fall with people who couldn't breathe. He linked it to high levels of mold spores that appeared in the humid, late summer months.
"These are potent allergens," but only for people who have mold allergies, said Dr. Jordan Fink, a Medical College of Wisconsin professor and past president of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
Molds produce irritants that can provoke coughing, and some make spores that contain toxins, which further irritate airways.
"The real pariah is this thing called Stachybotrys chartarum. This organism produces a greater variety of toxins and in greater concentrations than any other mold that's been studied," Money said.
Doctors at Cleveland's Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital blamed it for a cluster of cases of pulmonary hemorrhage, or bleeding into the lungs, that killed several children in the 1990s, but the link was never proved.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there is no firm evidence linking mold to the lung problem, memory loss or other alleged woes beyond asthma and allergy. However, the sheer amount of it in the South could trigger problems for some people who haven't had them before, medical experts said.
"The child who didn't have a significant problem before may be in a much different scenario now," said Dr. Michael Wasserman, a pediatrician at Ochsner Clinic in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie whose office and home were flooded and are now covered in mold. He plans to tear down his house.
Even dead mold can provoke asthma in susceptible people, meaning that places open to the public _ restaurants, schools, businesses _ must eliminate it.
This is most true for hospitals, where mold spores can cause deadly lung diseases in people with weak immune systems or organ transplants. Such concerns already led Charity Hospital's owners to mothball it.
Tulane University Hospital and Clinic's cleanup is expected to take months.
"The first floor's got pretty much mold. It's going to be pretty much a total loss," said Ron Chatagnier, project coordinator for C&B Services, a Texas company hired by the hospital's owner, HCA.
"It might be difficult or impossible to reopen some of these medical centers," said Joe Cappiello, an official with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
"It's not just the physical destruction that you see," but ventilation systems and ductwork full of mold, ready "to seed the rest of the hospital with spores" if the heat or air conditioning were turned on, he said.
As for houses, "anything that's been submerged probably will be a tear-down," said Jeffrey May, a Boston-area building inspector, chemist and book author who has investigated thousands of buildings for mold problems.
Clothes can be washed or dry cleaned, but most furniture is a loss. Ditto for carpeting, insulation, wallpaper and drywall, which no longer lives up to its name. Mattresses that didn't get wet probably have mold if they were in a room that did.
"Anything with a cushion you can forget about," May said.
The general advice is the same as when food is suspected of being spoiled: when in doubt, throw it out.
When is professional help needed?
"It's simply a matter of extent. If you've got small areas of mold, just a few square feet, it's something a homeowner can clean with 10 percent bleach," said Anu Dixit, a fungus expert at Saint Louis University.
She studied mold after the Mississippi River floods in 1993 and 1994, and found cleaning measures often were ineffective, mainly because people started rebuilding too soon, before the surrounding area was completely dry.
In the New Orleans suburb of Lakeview, Toby Roesler found a water line 7 feet high on his home and mold growing in large black and white colonies from every wall and ceiling on the first floor.
Wearing goggles, a mask and rubber gloves, he sprayed down the stairwell with a bleach solution. A crew will arrive soon to gut the lower floor.
"I think it's salvageable," he said, but admitted, "It's going to be some gross work to get it ready."
Others won't try.
Dionne Thiel, who lives next door to the Randazzo family, was only 7 when Hurricane Betsy raced through her neighborhood 40 years ago. Returning on Monday, after Hurricane Katrina, something was instantly familiar.
"The mold and the water," she said. "It's the exact same smell."
Mold covered her dining room walls, snaked up doorframes and even found its way into the candles she sold for a living. She and her husband salvaged his golf clubs but left the rest. They'll move to Arizona.
"I would never want to live here again," said her husband, Don Thiel. "It's not going to be safe."
___
Associated Press writers Julia Silverman and Allen G. Breed contributed reporting for this story from Louisiana; Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione reported from Milwaukee.
Another thing to consider seriously is being current on your vaccinations, tetnus, hepatitus (a + b ?) etc.. Don't leave home without them... Good luck BUIC
what to look for in flooded houses, SNAKES