Flood Damage Cleanup in Tuscaloosa County

Cribbs Mill Creek, Cypress Creek, Hurricane Creek and Cottondale Creek do this on a schedule set by the rain rather than by the season. The Black Warrior is a different story. Northport took river flooding in 1951 and again in 1979, but with Oliver and Holt locks and dams on the river and levee work since, that has become the rare event rather than the usual one.

Why the creeks do this and the river no longer does

The Black Warrior between Northport and Tuscaloosa is a managed river. Oliver Lock and Dam and Holt Lock and Dam hold pools on it, levee work protects ground that used to go under, and the last time Northport took a serious river flood was more than forty years ago. Two generations have grown up here without seeing the river inside a house, which is a good part of why a creek catches people out.

A creek runs on a different clock entirely. Three inches of rain onto ground that is already wet does not soak into red clay, it moves, and Cribbs Mill Creek or Cottondale Creek can be out of its banks and back inside them between one hour and the next. There is usually no warning, often no mapped flood zone involved, and the whole event can be finished before anybody thinks to take a photograph.

Bottomland drains on its own schedule

Out toward Fosters, where the county flattens into river bottom, the ground does not shed water so much as hold it. A field can sit under standing water long after the rain that put it there has moved on, and a crawl space in that country refills about as fast as it is emptied while the water table is still up. That is not a pump failing. That is the site the house is standing on.

It changes how the work is scheduled rather than whether it can be done. On a bottomland loss we pump, get the soft material out, and then watch the ground before committing to a drying phase, because dehumidifiers working against a saturated site spend days for very little. The same house on higher ground a few miles away dries out in an ordinary week.

Water that looks clean is still Category 3

Creek water in this county has crossed pasture, road surface, parking lot and, through the unsewered south and west, more than one septic drain field on its way to a house. It does not look like sewage and it gets handled as though it were. The classification is not a judgment about how dirty the water appears. It is a judgment about what has had the opportunity to get into it.

So the rules do not soften because a flood was brief. Carpet and pad, particle board, batt insulation and wallboard to a marked line above the high water come out rather than getting dried. Framing, subfloor, piers, slab and tile stay, and they are washed down first and treated second, in that order and not the reverse. A two-hour creek flood takes the same material out of a house as a two-day one.