Storm Damage Water Cleanup in Tuscaloosa County

East of Tuscaloosa the county goes to timber. Around Brookwood, Vance and the Hurricane Creek drainage, a storm has pines and hardwoods to bring down before it reaches anybody, and a limb through the decking is a more common call here than a roof stripped bare. When lines come down in that country, the power stays off for days rather than hours.

Two houses a block apart, two different jobs

On April 27, 2011 an EF-4 crossed the city through Rosedale, Forest Lake and Alberta and went on toward Holt. Fifty-three people in the county died, about twelve percent of Tuscaloosa was destroyed, and the damage ran to something near a billion and a half dollars. What is left of it on the ground now is a construction line, with blocks of rebuilt housing running beside streets the storm never touched.

That matters on a storm call because the two kinds of house take water differently. The rebuild stock is slab on grade, engineered truss and OSB sheathing with blown attic insulation, and water runs flat and wide across the floor. The house on the next street is pre-war frame over a crawl space with board decking and batts between the joists, and the same rain goes straight through the floor and out of sight.

What comes down out of the woods east of town

The first question on a tree strike is not how much water came in. It is whether the roof is still carrying its own load. A limb punched between two rafters leaves an opening that can be covered and worked around. A trunk laid across the ridge breaks rafters or truss chords, and a roof in that condition is not something to put a ladder, a crew or a few hundred pounds of drying equipment underneath.

The outage is the other half of it. Extraction runs off the truck and does not care what the utility is doing, but drying does. Air movers and dehumidifiers only earn their keep running without a break, and a generator switched off overnight to save fuel hands back most of what the day gained. Where Brookwood and Vance are out for several days, we would rather pull soaked material early than run equipment in bursts.

One storm, two kinds of water

The same line of storms that lifts a course of shingles can put a creek over its banks an hour later, and one house can take both. They are not the same loss. Rain that came through the roof arrives from above, wets the ceiling and the top of the wall first, and leaves no mark on the siding. Creek water arrives from outside and below, leaves a level line on the wall and the pier skirting, and brings silt with it.

Keeping them apart matters because they are handled differently and they are paid differently. Roof water in a clean attic can often be dried where it sits. Creek water is contaminated the moment it enters and takes the porous material with it when it goes. On a house that got both, we set the waterline, photograph it, and scope above and below it as two pieces of work rather than one.