Tuscaloosa County, Alabama
Water Damage Restoration in Fosters, AL
Fosters sits on river bottomland southwest of the city, and ground water here behaves differently from anywhere closer in. It arrives slowly, it stays, and it is not clean.
What water damage looks like in Fosters
Bottomland does not shed water; it holds it. After a long wet spell the ground beside a Fosters house is not merely damp, it is full, and it has nowhere to put the next inch of rain that falls on it. Water then stands in the yard and under the floor for days after the sky has cleared. That is a slower and duller emergency than a burst pipe, and it does more harm, because everything wooden sits in saturated air long enough to take moisture all the way through.
The house is often not the most valuable building on a Fosters property. Shops, equipment sheds, feed storage and the well house all matter to the people who own them, and they tend to be built plainer — slab poured straight on grade with nothing under it, or timber posts set directly into the ground. Water in those buildings damages the contents more than the structure, and the first hour is usually best spent getting things up off the floor and onto blocks.
Ground water in the bottoms has crossed pasture, field and septic drainage before it arrives at a foundation, and it gives no sign of that at all. Clear is not the same as clean. A crawl space that has taken it needs the standing water pumped out, the wet insulation and porous material removed, the framing cleaned and treated, and only then dried and monitored. Pointing a fan at the hatch is the version of this job that produces a second and larger one in September.
The building stock
Farm and acreage property, older frame housing on piers, manufactured homes, and outbuildings that matter as much as the house does to the people who own them.
Weather and water
Low-lying bottomland near the river takes standing water after sustained rain, and it drains slowly. That is a completely different problem from the flash flooding that hits the creeks closer to town.
The short version
- County
- Tuscaloosa County, Alabama
- ZIP codes
- 35463
- From Tuscaloosa
- About 15 miles
- Drains toward
- the Black Warrior River, Big Creek and Sipsey River bottomland
- Utilities
- private wells and rural water systems
- Dispatch
- (205) 927-8756
A typical Fosters job
Three days of rain, nine days of water
A week of rain in late winter puts the bottomland under, and a farmhouse on piers ends up with more than a foot standing in the crawl space. The yard drains inside two days. The crawl space does not drain at all, because the ground holding it is already full. Nine days later the floor upstairs still feels ordinary and the readings in the joists do not. The space is pumped, the insulation and old barrier come out, the framing is cleaned and treated, and drying runs closed with dehumidification, because opening it to this air only feeds the problem.
What decides the size of a Fosters job
Water that has been on the ground is contaminated water whatever it looks like. Bottomland flooding in a crawl space needs pumping, cleaning and antimicrobial treatment before any drying is worth starting.
How the work runs, start to finish →
Before we arrive: what to do in the first fifteen minutes.
Areas of Fosters
- Highway 11 southwest
- Fosters community
- river bottomland