Water Damage Restoration in Tuscaloosa, AL

What water damage looks like in Tuscaloosa

The river gets the attention and the creeks do the work. Cribbs Mill Creek and Cypress Creek drain parts of the city that are mostly roof and pavement now, so they come up within an hour of hard rain and drop again almost as quickly. That timing is the whole problem. The water is off the yard by evening and still standing under the floor, and on the older streets nobody opens a crawl space hatch until something starts to smell.

Within a mile of Bryant-Denny Stadium there are houses from 1915 and houses from 2013, and the older ones set the pace of the work. Original plaster on lath will let go of the lath if it is pushed hard, and heart pine flooring that has been flat for a century cups and splits under too much heat. Those buildings get lower airflow, more readings and more days. A rebuilt house in Alberta takes the aggressive schedule and finishes well ahead of it.

A large share of this city's housing is rented rather than owned, which changes who calls and how long it takes them. On an owner-occupied street in Pinehurst somebody hears the water. In a block of units the report goes to a management office, then to a maintenance number, and the building stays wet through every one of those steps. If you are calling about a rental, the most useful thing you can tell us is who can physically let a crew in tonight, because access decides the schedule more often than anything else does.

The building stock

Four distinct kinds of building stock share one city. The historic districts around the campus — Dearing Place, Alaca Place, University Circle, College Park — are early-twentieth-century houses on crawl spaces with heart pine framing and, in places, original plaster. The student rental market is tens of thousands of beds in purpose-built apartment blocks and converted houses. Alberta, Rosedale and Forest Lake carry a large amount of post-2011 rebuild construction, which is modern and slab-built. And the West End and Holt hold older, smaller frame housing on piers.

Weather and water

The April 27, 2011 EF-4 crossed the city through Rosedale, Forest Lake, Alberta and on toward Holt. Fifty-three people died in the county and the city put the damage near $1.5 billion, with roughly twelve percent of Tuscaloosa destroyed. Fifteen years on, the practical legacy for our work is that the rebuilt corridors behave like new construction while the streets either side of them did not change at all.