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How To Prevent Water Damage From Severe Weather

Article by David Selter

IF you live along the Texas gulf coast, you’re definitely familiar with the fact that weather events are responsible for causing more and more water damage to homes and businesses. For the last several years our area has been engaged in nonstop water damage cleanup from a series of storms. The most recent and severe of these have been the Great Freeze of 2021 and Hurricane Harvey. 

No longer do water damage restoration companies deal mainly with damage from broken pipes, malfunctioning appliances, or faulty AC drains. Now area wide flooding events – and the devastation they cause – have become a common occurrence. Based on what we’ve seen the past few years, we have a few suggestions on how to prevent or mitigate water damage to your home from these events.

When a hard freeze is predicted there is inevitably a run-on hardware stores for pipe-insulating material. It’s pretty obvious that we should already have the materials to insulate the exposed pipes in our homes (and don’t forget the pipes in the attic) by the start of the winter season. 

But one thing we may not think of when a dangerous hard freeze is predicted is to be sure to have plenty on drinking water on hand. Of course, the loss of water to hundreds of thousands of people that occurred in the winter of 2021 is not common even in a severe freeze, but the loss of electricity is. If you lose electricity when the wind chill is near zero degrees, it won’t take long for your home to lose its heat and make the pipes in your outside walls and attic much more susceptible to freezing. In fact, this was one of the main causes that we witnessed for severe water damage during the Great Freeze. 

Broken pipes in the wall or attic can flood an entire home very quickly. The solution is to turn off the water supply to your home and drain the pipes. Hence the importance of having an adequate supply of drinking water. The CDC recommends that you have one gallon of drinking water per person per day on hand. And don’t forget water for the pets. But before you turn off your water supply, make sure to fill your bathtubs with water to flush the toilets. We really don’t have a clue how much water we use until it’s not there. 

Rising water from major rain events is for the most part unstoppable. After all, it only takes an inch or two of contaminated flood water entering your house to cause major damage. But what exacerbates the situation is the loss of electricity that often accompanies these storms. 

When a house has even an inch or two of water in it, the wet materials need to be removed and the drying process begun before the water continues to wick up the walls, and the insulation behind the walls. But during an area wide event, when hundreds or thousands of homes are flooded, it’s almost impossible to find help that fast.  

But if your AC is still functioning, you can at least somewhat control the environment in your home. It won’t really help with the drying process, but it can at least keep humidity levels lower and possibly mitigate some of the secondary damage. 

Evaporation from the wet drywall and insulation will increase the humidity in the house and induce the growth of mold.  The EPA states that “Indoor relative humidity (RH) should be kept below 60 percent” to deter the growth of mold. Secondary damage may sound almost “not very serious”, unless like us you’ve seen hundreds of homes covered in mold and completely gutted from a few inches of water. 

The obvious, but costly solution is to purchase a standby generator, but that is just part of the answer. Even when the electricity for the most part didn’t go off, like during Hurricane Harvey, rising water destroyed many of the AC units located outside of the homes, and allowed the humidity inside the wet homes to soar. 

One important thing you can do is to raise your outside AC units several feet above ground level. It’s not that costly and you can save money by having it done in the off season when AC repair demand is lower. And if you do spring for a whole house backup generator, make sure it’s also elevated, so that you don’t get soaked in more ways than one.

For immediate water removal, drying and water damage repair, contact DRYMORE at 281-930-0100!

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