Tuscaloosa County, Alabama
Water Damage Restoration in Cottondale, AL
Cottondale sits where the interstate, the creek and the old Birmingham road all cross, and each one produces a different kind of water call.
What water damage looks like in Cottondale
Cottondale Creek is a small creek with a great deal of hard ground draining into it. The interstate, the ramps, the truck lots and the service pads around the interchange all shed into the same low channel, so it fills in half an hour and is back down by dark. That is exactly why it gets forgiven. Nobody was flooded, nothing was ruined, and there is simply water under a floor that will still be there two weeks later.
Manufactured homes make up a good share of the housing here, and they hold water better than any other structure we work in. The underside is wrapped, which is what keeps road spray and cold air out of the floor; it also means a leak inside the home has nothing to fall through. It collects on the wrap, against the underside of the decking, and it stays there. Nothing done standing in the room reaches it, and the first sign is usually a floor that gives slightly near the tub.
The commercial strip is its own category — truck service, storage, small warehousing, concrete floors with drains cut into them. Water in those buildings is rarely a structural emergency and almost always an inventory one, and the useful first hour goes on getting product up off the floor rather than on running equipment. The 2000 tornado through Englewood is the local reference for storm damage, but the calls this community actually produces are about rain volume far more often than wind.
The building stock
A mix that reflects its position on the highway: older frame housing on piers along the original Birmingham road, newer subdivisions filling in behind it, a significant amount of manufactured housing, and light commercial and truck-service property around the interchange.
Weather and water
The 2000 tornado through Englewood and Cottondale is still the local reference point. Cottondale Creek is the flooding concern rather than the river — it comes up quickly after heavy rain and goes down almost as fast, which is exactly the pattern that leaves water in a crawl space nobody thinks to check.
The short version
- County
- Tuscaloosa County, Alabama
- ZIP codes
- 35453
- From Tuscaloosa
- About 7 miles
- Drains toward
- Cottondale Creek, Hurricane Creek and the Black Warrior River
- Utilities
- Tuscaloosa County water authorities and private wells
- Dispatch
- (205) 927-8756
A typical Cottondale job
Half an hour of creek, two weeks of damp
Two inches of rain falls in forty minutes across the interchange and Cottondale Creek tops into the low yards behind the old Birmingham road. By nightfall the yards look normal again. Under one of the older frame houses on piers there is a foot of standing water that nobody has looked at. Creek water is not clean water, so the order is pumping, then removal of the soaked insulation and anything else porous, then cleaning and antimicrobial treatment, and only after that any drying. Left three weeks, the same job arrives with a joist and subfloor problem attached.
What decides the size of a Cottondale job
Manufactured housing here has its own failure mode. The belly wrap under the floor keeps water out well — which means once water gets in, it is held against the decking with nowhere to drain.
How the work runs, start to finish →
Before we arrive: what to do in the first fifteen minutes.
Areas of Cottondale
- the I-20/59 interchange
- Old Birmingham Highway
- Englewood
- Buttermilk Road