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sciatrixSo I think I mentioned, we flooded last week on Friday evening. What that means, if you've been fortunate enough to never live in a place that flooded before, is that we walked down the hallway on Friday, noticed standing water, immediately started bailing everything we could out, and have spent the subsequent few days with my poor roommates sleeping in the living room and me and T (miraculously, this time spared) in our room for once instead of in the living room with everyone else.
Last time this happened, we bought everyone s'mores and weenies and roasted them on the gas stove, because it felt so much like camping. I'm going to swing by and pick up s'mores tonight, probably, because ffffuuuuuuck this shit. (The electrician just terrified me by suggesting they might have to ask us to turn off all our lights and outlets in order to support the fans and dehumidifiers in here for drying the walls. Fortunately we've dodged that bullet, but I want fucking melty chocolate now.)
T and I own our current place, and this will be our third go-round with a flood incident since we bought it in 2016, so I suppose I qualify as a veteran of this shit now? Hell if I know. But... if I write this out once, maybe this time I won't forget about it, and maybe next time it will help someone else. Probably I should be sanding the rough edges off my committee talk to turn it into a departmental seminar talk for two hours from now, but this is what's on my mind.
This is from the perspective of someone dealing with US homeowner's insurance via water damage, but I have also dealt with this from the perspective of someone dealing with US renter's insurance if that's your bag. (If you don't have renter's insurance and you rent, you should definitely go get some. It's cheap, and it exists primarily to cover your stuff in the event that your landlord or someone living in your building fucks up and you lose all your belongings. It will also cover you in liability if you fuck up the building, which is why some landlords require it. I don't require it for my roommates/tenants, but I did just sit down with M and give her a very dry, pointed talk about what it is and why she might be glad she has it, given our general luck in this house; god knows I was grateful when I needed mine.
I have no idea how this works in other countries, but I'd be happy if folks who have dealt with this want to chime in.
First thing: hope to fuck your plumbing bust, or your neighbor's did, or there was a fire and the firefighters soaked everything. If that's the case, this is going to all be a whole lot simpler for you, because those cases fall under regular homeowner's or renter's insurance. They cover most of the shit that can go wrong with your place of living, and they will know who to contact next. They also often including helpful perks like "setting you, the person what lives there, up in a hotel until the place is totally fixed" and "nice burly men to pack up all your things and pull it out of the place so it doesn't get damaged" and "helping you replace all that stuff which is definitely not salvagable."
(I have USAA*, which my contractors inform me is uniformly great to work with on both their end and (they think) their clients'. I can confirm USAA has always treated me well, even though I estimate that they have had to pay out the nose on me and my shit luck over the course of the last several years. (If you do own a place, find one set of contractors who are trustworthy and ask them for referrals. They know who's a decent person to work with and who isn't, usually. We're lucky: the flood remediation folks that USAA sent us the first time are really, really good, and let me know if you need an outfit that does this in Texas because I'd happily recommend them again.)
However, if you flooded because of the weather or other natural causes shit (e.g. hurricanes), you're dealing with FEMA. This sucks, in part because the FEMA program is a ridiculous cobbled-together nightmare that was never intended to extend this far, in part because the floodplain maps have not been updated to comply with climate change because it would more or less destroy the program (at least according to gossip from my buddy in conservation, anyway), and in part because of chronic underfunding and chronic over-use by people who are mostly using it for second vacation homes. There's a good John Oliver segment on some of the issues with FEMA flood insurance here. What he does not talk about is the horrifying exhaustion of actually trying to live in a house that has been damaged by flood under FEMA, so that's what I'm nattering about here.
The problem is that FEMA often does not reimburse claims for a long, long time. So many contractors, in my experience, refuse to be paid out of FEMA. For example, my flood remediation company is still waiting on FEMA to repay it for work it did three years ago in the Houston area--it's still taking time. Some private insurance companies, like USAA*, will basically agree to pay damages in the understanding that they will then go after FEMA on their own for reimbursement. Others effectively offer support and suggestions while you have to negotiate for reimbursement through FEMA itself. Often what contractors will do is offer 12-month financing up front without interest, which is basically buying time for you to fight with FEMA to get your money back.
One thing a lot of people don't realize after floods is that not only do you have all your shit damaged, but the house and walls itself need to be intensively dried both inside and out to prevent mold and bacterial growth. Water is categorized three ways in terms of biohazard content and potential danger: category 1/"clean" water, which is basically clean and totally fine once your draw it out, category 2/"grey" water, which is Gross Shit, and category 3/"black" water, which is Actively Biohazardous. For some context, sewage leaks are category 3, and so are rising floodwaters which are often contaminated with sewage. If your flooding is category 3, everything that touches that water which is porous, like fabrics, towels, carpets, and the underlaying of your floors, will need to be disposed of as contaminated biohazard. Any water that sits for 48 hours moves up a category, such that if you don't get your Category 1 flooding dried out and completely cleared inside and out within 48 hours, it's now Cat 2, and if you let your Cat 2 flooding sit another 48 hours without completely drying it inside and out, it goes to Cat 3. That's because micro-organisms, bacteria, molds, etc and other nasty respiratory shit will breed very quickly if you don't dry the space well.
When I say drying the spill inside and out, I mean that if your walls are touched by flood, you are looking at removing the bottom foot or so of all of those walls so that you can get inside them to dry the interior structures. If you are lucky enough to have never lived in a house being renovated or otherwise dealing with holes in the walls, most modern walls have both an exterior wall and an interior one, with wooden framing and insulation between. You need to just get into one side and then shove fans up against all those walls, with dehumidifiers running. My place is about 1200 sqft, with four bedrooms, so we're getting... I think we're winding up borrowing something like 24 fans and keeping our two massive dehumidifiers that we've had on loan for a week or so? All of these things are LOUD as hell and run hot, so you should expect to also be running your A/C on high no matter what temperature it is inside or out for the duration. Because of the time sensitivity, the faster you can call flood remediation folks, the better--the more likely that you won't have to lose your shit. The moment water stops actively spilling into your house, start doing laundry aggressively. You want to bleach everything (using colorfast bleach if necessary) in the wash.
You will also almost certainly wind up losing some or all of your flooring. If you have carpet, well, the carpet is obviously fucked unless you can completely dry the top stuff immediately, but the problem isn't just with the bits of the floor you feel with your feet: floors, like walls, are made in layers. What kinds of layers you have will depend on your exact floors, but most kinds of floor have some kind of underlayment, which is usually a soft foam layer for things like vinyl, laminate, carpet, and newer hardwood floors. You may also have solid wood underlayment, in which case you still have to get at that shit to dry it properly. At the very least, your water remediation people need to rip up your floors to look at the underlayment, just to make sure it's all doing okay and not contaminated and to confirm what it is. If your home was built by the same goatfucking incompetents as mine, you may even realize that they tried to use paint as a structural material as well under laminate floors, meaning that your "underlayment" is just a swathe of newly-wet paint that the poor floors man finds himself trapped in.
Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything.
Now, if you look around a house that folks are still living inside, you will notice that it's kind of hard to cut out the bottom foot of all those walls and also large swathes of floors because there's a whole lot of STUFF in the way. So normally the first stage of the flood remediation team is to set up fans and a dehumidifier to minimize the damage as quickly as possible, and then they'll order something called a pack-out. This is like... moving professionals for people dealing with housing disasters. They'll pack all your shit up very neatly, truck it out into their own climate-controlled facility, and store it while the nice flooding folks are fixing the damage. Usually, insurance will helpfully ship you out to a hotel (either pet-friendly or boarding your animals if you have pets) for the duration. This is how I wound up living in a hotel room with two cats, a dog, and two other humans for six weeks in 2017. While you and all your shit are out of the way, the flood remediation teams will tackle your house, get it safe for human and animal inhabitation, and get everything dry; then they'll fix your walls, paint your newly-replaced walls in whatever color you like best, and replace all the other shit you might have lost, like vanities or sinks.
FEMA does not, unfortunately, cover any of this nice shit. FEMA expects you to be surviving a disaster, just barely, or elsewise to have your own goddamn accommodations. FEMA will not cover anything involving taking your stuff out of your home to store it while repairs are happening. They also will not cover hotel costs, which means that while your home is being repaired, you still have to live in it or else eat an astronomical fee for room and board on your own. We do not have this kind of money, so we have historically elected to try and live in the house while it's being fixed.**
Imagine how fun this is when only your living room has survived. hahahaha OH GOD.
What FEMA will cover is hiring strong burly men to pick up your shit and move it around your properly, and this only if they use the magic words on the invoice: content manipulation. It took us weeks to learn this last time, and there are a lot of folks who specialize in flood remediation who have no idea this is an option. If you have a garage, great! You can hire people to haul all your crap into the garage and put it safely there for you, and that will be reimburseable (either through your insurer, if they're comfortable going to fight FEMA for you, or via FEMA itself). If you're unlucky, like we are, and don't have a garage but only a carport with no walls, what you can do is hire a giant storage unit and put it on your front lawn. As long as it's on your property, content manipulation is on the invoices, and no one uses the wrong words to describe what's happening, you should be okay.
Feel free to share this if anyone finds it helpful. Christ knows natural disasters are tremendously expensive in time, money, and energy to folks who are surviving them, and I fully expect these kinds of flooding disasters to become exponentially more common with climate change fueling more and more extreme weather patterns.
Oh: and note, regular renters' insurance and homeowner's insurance do not cover this; to be covered by flood stuff, you need to have your shit covered with flood insurance specifically. I would encourage anyone who lives in Texas and has any property on the ground level of any place, at this point, to invest in flood insurance (renters' or homeowner's).
*(I wish I had better suggestions for who to purchase flood and homeowner insurance from than USAA, because unless you are military, ex-military, or have a parent or spouse with USAA, you're shit out of luck. More on eligibility here. The problem is that I use insurance because of major disasters in my life often enough that you will pry USAA out of my cold dead fingers, and as my parents had USAA, I've always used them. They are routinely praised by contractors and other folks who routinely deal with insurance companies pretty much universally, and they're comfortable working internationally because they work with the military. They tend to be conservative about issuing loans, and I don't think they're the cheapest insurance outfit out there, but otherwise the universal opinion I have seen from contractors, medical professional, etc. as well as other people who use them is that they take care of their people--both employees and clients.
Seriously, at some point I ought to write to them with a thank-you: I've had claims in excess of $5,000 through them for car accidents (totaled car), medical bills from a car accident, renter's insurance claims, homeowner's claims, and FEMA flood claims about... seven or eight times in the past seven years? I have not been a cheap client.)
**We have farmed a few of the animals out to kind friends, one or two of whom also offered to take human guests, but for logistics involving jobs and class all of the humans are sticking around. The Most Obnoxious Cat is off with friend R while friend P has the tarantula and the frog, partly because we're concerned about their respiratory health in the midst of the construction and partly because the contractors are generally really freaked out by spiders and I'd like to not give anyone heart attacks, thanks.
(P is very relaxed about the spider but terrified of accidentally killing the frog. I understand this, but I also find it pretty funny.)
Those are all three roommate pets--all of my animals (three cats, one dog) are still here, as is a remaining roommate cat, because that crew more or less all gets along and can self-regulate their own locations to avoid respiratory stress/all get locked together in my bathroom while workmen are working. The cat who's been farmed out is currently on the outs with two other cats, so he's going to stay with R and her cats and re-learn feline social skills while we figure out how to reintroduce him to Peter, who will tolerate him but Doesn't Like Him, and Tiberius, who has previously evinced an uncharacteristic desire to straight-up murder him. They haven't interacted since Spock--evacuated cat--had a rotten tooth pulled, though, so I'm hoping Ti is just one of those cats who zeros in on sickness. His relationship with Peter has also dramatically improved since Pete got his own dental, and it would be nice to not be playing crate-and-rotate with cats, especially not when Spock is a goddamn door-dasher.
Anyway.
If you've found this guide helpful and want to drop a few dollars in the tip jar, I have a Ko-Fi here.
Last time this happened, we bought everyone s'mores and weenies and roasted them on the gas stove, because it felt so much like camping. I'm going to swing by and pick up s'mores tonight, probably, because ffffuuuuuuck this shit. (The electrician just terrified me by suggesting they might have to ask us to turn off all our lights and outlets in order to support the fans and dehumidifiers in here for drying the walls. Fortunately we've dodged that bullet, but I want fucking melty chocolate now.)
T and I own our current place, and this will be our third go-round with a flood incident since we bought it in 2016, so I suppose I qualify as a veteran of this shit now? Hell if I know. But... if I write this out once, maybe this time I won't forget about it, and maybe next time it will help someone else. Probably I should be sanding the rough edges off my committee talk to turn it into a departmental seminar talk for two hours from now, but this is what's on my mind.
This is from the perspective of someone dealing with US homeowner's insurance via water damage, but I have also dealt with this from the perspective of someone dealing with US renter's insurance if that's your bag. (If you don't have renter's insurance and you rent, you should definitely go get some. It's cheap, and it exists primarily to cover your stuff in the event that your landlord or someone living in your building fucks up and you lose all your belongings. It will also cover you in liability if you fuck up the building, which is why some landlords require it. I don't require it for my roommates/tenants, but I did just sit down with M and give her a very dry, pointed talk about what it is and why she might be glad she has it, given our general luck in this house; god knows I was grateful when I needed mine.
I have no idea how this works in other countries, but I'd be happy if folks who have dealt with this want to chime in.
First thing: hope to fuck your plumbing bust, or your neighbor's did, or there was a fire and the firefighters soaked everything. If that's the case, this is going to all be a whole lot simpler for you, because those cases fall under regular homeowner's or renter's insurance. They cover most of the shit that can go wrong with your place of living, and they will know who to contact next. They also often including helpful perks like "setting you, the person what lives there, up in a hotel until the place is totally fixed" and "nice burly men to pack up all your things and pull it out of the place so it doesn't get damaged" and "helping you replace all that stuff which is definitely not salvagable."
(I have USAA*, which my contractors inform me is uniformly great to work with on both their end and (they think) their clients'. I can confirm USAA has always treated me well, even though I estimate that they have had to pay out the nose on me and my shit luck over the course of the last several years. (If you do own a place, find one set of contractors who are trustworthy and ask them for referrals. They know who's a decent person to work with and who isn't, usually. We're lucky: the flood remediation folks that USAA sent us the first time are really, really good, and let me know if you need an outfit that does this in Texas because I'd happily recommend them again.)
However, if you flooded because of the weather or other natural causes shit (e.g. hurricanes), you're dealing with FEMA. This sucks, in part because the FEMA program is a ridiculous cobbled-together nightmare that was never intended to extend this far, in part because the floodplain maps have not been updated to comply with climate change because it would more or less destroy the program (at least according to gossip from my buddy in conservation, anyway), and in part because of chronic underfunding and chronic over-use by people who are mostly using it for second vacation homes. There's a good John Oliver segment on some of the issues with FEMA flood insurance here. What he does not talk about is the horrifying exhaustion of actually trying to live in a house that has been damaged by flood under FEMA, so that's what I'm nattering about here.
The problem is that FEMA often does not reimburse claims for a long, long time. So many contractors, in my experience, refuse to be paid out of FEMA. For example, my flood remediation company is still waiting on FEMA to repay it for work it did three years ago in the Houston area--it's still taking time. Some private insurance companies, like USAA*, will basically agree to pay damages in the understanding that they will then go after FEMA on their own for reimbursement. Others effectively offer support and suggestions while you have to negotiate for reimbursement through FEMA itself. Often what contractors will do is offer 12-month financing up front without interest, which is basically buying time for you to fight with FEMA to get your money back.
One thing a lot of people don't realize after floods is that not only do you have all your shit damaged, but the house and walls itself need to be intensively dried both inside and out to prevent mold and bacterial growth. Water is categorized three ways in terms of biohazard content and potential danger: category 1/"clean" water, which is basically clean and totally fine once your draw it out, category 2/"grey" water, which is Gross Shit, and category 3/"black" water, which is Actively Biohazardous. For some context, sewage leaks are category 3, and so are rising floodwaters which are often contaminated with sewage. If your flooding is category 3, everything that touches that water which is porous, like fabrics, towels, carpets, and the underlaying of your floors, will need to be disposed of as contaminated biohazard. Any water that sits for 48 hours moves up a category, such that if you don't get your Category 1 flooding dried out and completely cleared inside and out within 48 hours, it's now Cat 2, and if you let your Cat 2 flooding sit another 48 hours without completely drying it inside and out, it goes to Cat 3. That's because micro-organisms, bacteria, molds, etc and other nasty respiratory shit will breed very quickly if you don't dry the space well.
When I say drying the spill inside and out, I mean that if your walls are touched by flood, you are looking at removing the bottom foot or so of all of those walls so that you can get inside them to dry the interior structures. If you are lucky enough to have never lived in a house being renovated or otherwise dealing with holes in the walls, most modern walls have both an exterior wall and an interior one, with wooden framing and insulation between. You need to just get into one side and then shove fans up against all those walls, with dehumidifiers running. My place is about 1200 sqft, with four bedrooms, so we're getting... I think we're winding up borrowing something like 24 fans and keeping our two massive dehumidifiers that we've had on loan for a week or so? All of these things are LOUD as hell and run hot, so you should expect to also be running your A/C on high no matter what temperature it is inside or out for the duration. Because of the time sensitivity, the faster you can call flood remediation folks, the better--the more likely that you won't have to lose your shit. The moment water stops actively spilling into your house, start doing laundry aggressively. You want to bleach everything (using colorfast bleach if necessary) in the wash.
You will also almost certainly wind up losing some or all of your flooring. If you have carpet, well, the carpet is obviously fucked unless you can completely dry the top stuff immediately, but the problem isn't just with the bits of the floor you feel with your feet: floors, like walls, are made in layers. What kinds of layers you have will depend on your exact floors, but most kinds of floor have some kind of underlayment, which is usually a soft foam layer for things like vinyl, laminate, carpet, and newer hardwood floors. You may also have solid wood underlayment, in which case you still have to get at that shit to dry it properly. At the very least, your water remediation people need to rip up your floors to look at the underlayment, just to make sure it's all doing okay and not contaminated and to confirm what it is. If your home was built by the same goatfucking incompetents as mine, you may even realize that they tried to use paint as a structural material as well under laminate floors, meaning that your "underlayment" is just a swathe of newly-wet paint that the poor floors man finds himself trapped in.
Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything.
Now, if you look around a house that folks are still living inside, you will notice that it's kind of hard to cut out the bottom foot of all those walls and also large swathes of floors because there's a whole lot of STUFF in the way. So normally the first stage of the flood remediation team is to set up fans and a dehumidifier to minimize the damage as quickly as possible, and then they'll order something called a pack-out. This is like... moving professionals for people dealing with housing disasters. They'll pack all your shit up very neatly, truck it out into their own climate-controlled facility, and store it while the nice flooding folks are fixing the damage. Usually, insurance will helpfully ship you out to a hotel (either pet-friendly or boarding your animals if you have pets) for the duration. This is how I wound up living in a hotel room with two cats, a dog, and two other humans for six weeks in 2017. While you and all your shit are out of the way, the flood remediation teams will tackle your house, get it safe for human and animal inhabitation, and get everything dry; then they'll fix your walls, paint your newly-replaced walls in whatever color you like best, and replace all the other shit you might have lost, like vanities or sinks.
FEMA does not, unfortunately, cover any of this nice shit. FEMA expects you to be surviving a disaster, just barely, or elsewise to have your own goddamn accommodations. FEMA will not cover anything involving taking your stuff out of your home to store it while repairs are happening. They also will not cover hotel costs, which means that while your home is being repaired, you still have to live in it or else eat an astronomical fee for room and board on your own. We do not have this kind of money, so we have historically elected to try and live in the house while it's being fixed.**
Imagine how fun this is when only your living room has survived. hahahaha OH GOD.
What FEMA will cover is hiring strong burly men to pick up your shit and move it around your properly, and this only if they use the magic words on the invoice: content manipulation. It took us weeks to learn this last time, and there are a lot of folks who specialize in flood remediation who have no idea this is an option. If you have a garage, great! You can hire people to haul all your crap into the garage and put it safely there for you, and that will be reimburseable (either through your insurer, if they're comfortable going to fight FEMA for you, or via FEMA itself). If you're unlucky, like we are, and don't have a garage but only a carport with no walls, what you can do is hire a giant storage unit and put it on your front lawn. As long as it's on your property, content manipulation is on the invoices, and no one uses the wrong words to describe what's happening, you should be okay.
Feel free to share this if anyone finds it helpful. Christ knows natural disasters are tremendously expensive in time, money, and energy to folks who are surviving them, and I fully expect these kinds of flooding disasters to become exponentially more common with climate change fueling more and more extreme weather patterns.
Oh: and note, regular renters' insurance and homeowner's insurance do not cover this; to be covered by flood stuff, you need to have your shit covered with flood insurance specifically. I would encourage anyone who lives in Texas and has any property on the ground level of any place, at this point, to invest in flood insurance (renters' or homeowner's).
*(I wish I had better suggestions for who to purchase flood and homeowner insurance from than USAA, because unless you are military, ex-military, or have a parent or spouse with USAA, you're shit out of luck. More on eligibility here. The problem is that I use insurance because of major disasters in my life often enough that you will pry USAA out of my cold dead fingers, and as my parents had USAA, I've always used them. They are routinely praised by contractors and other folks who routinely deal with insurance companies pretty much universally, and they're comfortable working internationally because they work with the military. They tend to be conservative about issuing loans, and I don't think they're the cheapest insurance outfit out there, but otherwise the universal opinion I have seen from contractors, medical professional, etc. as well as other people who use them is that they take care of their people--both employees and clients.
Seriously, at some point I ought to write to them with a thank-you: I've had claims in excess of $5,000 through them for car accidents (totaled car), medical bills from a car accident, renter's insurance claims, homeowner's claims, and FEMA flood claims about... seven or eight times in the past seven years? I have not been a cheap client.)
**We have farmed a few of the animals out to kind friends, one or two of whom also offered to take human guests, but for logistics involving jobs and class all of the humans are sticking around. The Most Obnoxious Cat is off with friend R while friend P has the tarantula and the frog, partly because we're concerned about their respiratory health in the midst of the construction and partly because the contractors are generally really freaked out by spiders and I'd like to not give anyone heart attacks, thanks.
(P is very relaxed about the spider but terrified of accidentally killing the frog. I understand this, but I also find it pretty funny.)
Those are all three roommate pets--all of my animals (three cats, one dog) are still here, as is a remaining roommate cat, because that crew more or less all gets along and can self-regulate their own locations to avoid respiratory stress/all get locked together in my bathroom while workmen are working. The cat who's been farmed out is currently on the outs with two other cats, so he's going to stay with R and her cats and re-learn feline social skills while we figure out how to reintroduce him to Peter, who will tolerate him but Doesn't Like Him, and Tiberius, who has previously evinced an uncharacteristic desire to straight-up murder him. They haven't interacted since Spock--evacuated cat--had a rotten tooth pulled, though, so I'm hoping Ti is just one of those cats who zeros in on sickness. His relationship with Peter has also dramatically improved since Pete got his own dental, and it would be nice to not be playing crate-and-rotate with cats, especially not when Spock is a goddamn door-dasher.
Anyway.
If you've found this guide helpful and want to drop a few dollars in the tip jar, I have a Ko-Fi here.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-15 12:37 am (UTC)Our basement has flooded several times (mostly from plumbing, once from a hurricane two days after an earthquake), but never more than a couple inches deep, and never with dirty water. Also, the flooring is washable throw rugs over cheap roll vinyl over bare concrete and the walls are removable paneling directly over wood frame/concrete block, so the procedure is move everything upstairs, rip up the flooring to take to the dump, fans and windows for three days, pry up enough paneling to check the wall interiors, buy more cheap vinyl flooring, move back in. I don't think we even bothered with an insurance claim last time.
FEMA flood insurance is an absolute mess and really needs to be fixed, but I suspect it will just fail instead, and then everyone in a poor neighborhood in a flood zone will just be screwed. :/
no subject
Date: 2019-05-15 04:37 am (UTC)As to what, in fact, did happen... well, last time I heard that place (in which we no longer live) still had the flooring it had at the time of the flood.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-15 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-17 12:36 pm (UTC)It was an interesting and informative read about the various types of insurance and coverage etc. Quite the worrying development on FEMA and likely increase of that type of flooding due to climate change...