When severe weather tears through a property, the clock starts immediately. How a property owner responds during the first one to two days following a severe weather event can make or break the restoration process. And when restoration isn’t done properly, extensive secondary damage, insurance claim denials, or mitigation costs far exceeding the initial amount lost could follow a property owner for months or even years.
Start outside – before you go in
To be safe, do not enter the structure until you have walked the perimeter. If the building has moved, any protruding nail can be fatal, and sinkholes will lead to caverns beneath the floor. Look for fallen power lines, smell gas, and examine the roofline for visible sag. If any of these circumstances exist, do not enter the structure. Wait for professionals or emergency workers to do so. This is not safety for safety’s sake. An unstable roofline will collapse inward. Water is energized. Contact with energized water can be fatal. Lifted nails can kill.
Know what can be saved and what can’t
People often mishandle this stage of the process – discarding things that could have been saved or, just as problematically, clinging to possessions that can’t be cleaned and pose a health risk.
Non-porous materials like tiles, metal, or some kinds of solid wood, can generally be restored if they weren’t submerged for too long. Floors, for instance, may need to be stripped, dried, and disinfected, but if they’re salvageable, you want to start that process as soon as possible. Wet materials can begin developing mold in as little as 48 hours.
Items like mattresses and box springs, on the other hand, can be all but impossible to clean and ought to be safely discarded if you even suspect that they were exposed to contaminated water. Part of what makes water damage smithtown ny dangerous is that you can’t always tell what’s been affected. Let professionals help you establish what’s an acceptable risk versus what needs to go.
Document before you disturb anything
Photograph or record every instance of storm damage before cleaning up as evidence for your insurance adjuster. High-res photos and video of standing water, debris lines on walls, damaged personal property, and structural damage are important. If possible, take the water depth – mark it on a wall, put a measuring tape in the shot.
1 inch of floodwater can cause up to $25,000 of damage to a typical single-story home (FEMA). Adjusters and courts are well aware of claims in which insufficient documentation led to owners paying expenses that should have been covered. Don’t let this be the case with you.
Log every contact from day one. Calls to the insurance company, visits from contractors, discussions with local officials – all of it should be dated, timed, and summarized in your log. This protects you if timing becomes an issue in the future.
Extract and dry within 48 hours
Mold spores don’t have to wait for an invitation. Especially in humid, post-storm conditions, spores can germinate in a day or two if they land on moist organic material. That’s practically a feast for drywall, subfloor, wood framing, and insulation!
And water isn’t content to hang out in the last place you saw it, either. Moisture travels upward through porous building materials, often seeping several inches above the apparent water line. A floor that appears and feels dry a few inches above the flooding level, for example, may still be incubating a reservoir of moisture inside its walls.
First of all, remove standing water with pumps and wet vacuums. Next, expedite evaporation with air movers and dehumidifiers designed to international drying standards – or the power of capillary action will work against your drying efforts. Regular room fans are not powerful or energy-savvy enough to do the job right.
Mitigation first, restoration second
First, it’s essential to grasp the difference between mitigation and restoration. Mitigation is about preventing any more damage. Restoration is about getting the property back to where it was. It’s not the same step, and it doesn’t occur at the same time.
Mitigation comes before restoration – tarps, board-ups, water extraction, and drying. After that, the rebuilding starts. You can’t restore until the structure is totally dry. But often, you’ll have restoration contractors pulling out wet drywall and cabinets to replace them before the moisture is even gone.
Before bringing in any contractor, check whether federal disaster assistance will be there. Speak to the agency first, see what it covers, what’s available, and what the rules are. Many homeowners discover that flood insurance is a separate policy from homeowners and get the first visit from the contractor the day after the water goes down – and the pumps are still running.
Recovery after severe weather is a lot of work. But there is a sequence to the work, and if you follow that sequence – especially in the first 48-72 hours – you’ve got a recoverable property. If not, you don’t.
