Water damage work in Mountain Home, Arkansas

No river runs through the built-up part of this city. Mountain Home sits at 820 feet on the Ozark plateau, spread across 11.94 square miles between Bull Shoals Lake to the west and Norfork Lake to the northeast, and its 12,825 residents get their water piped uphill from a lake they cannot see from town. Almost every wet floor here starts inside the building.

Water damage only in this city

Before anything else: the coverage bought for Mountain Home is the water side alone. Burst lines, appliance failures, roof leaks, storm water, sewer backups, drying and the mold that follows all belong on this line. Fire and smoke restoration does not. That is not a soft limit or a maybe — there is no fire contractor attached to this city here, and the honest thing is to say so before you spend a call on it.

1. You callOne number per county. The dispatcher takes the address, the ZIP and a short description of what happened.
2. A local crew calls backAn independent restoration contractor already working that county rings you directly and sets a time.
3. They look, then scope itNothing is priced from a phone call. The crew walks the building, takes readings, and writes a scope you can hand to your adjuster.

The city's water has one way in

Mountain Home draws raw water from Norfork Lake through an intake structure about a quarter mile from its treatment plant, and the lake water arrives at roughly pH 7.9 and 3.12 NTU turbidity. That single intake, and the pump station behind it, are the city's supply. The pump station that serves the 1080 pressure zone was built in 1969 and is now a single point of failure, which is why the city approved $20 million in bonds for a Lake Norfork intake redundancy project.

The dirty side is under work too. The wastewater plant is taking a $1,350,000 upgrade for UV disinfection and rebuilt headworks and bar screens, several lift stations still run pumps that are twenty to thirty years old, and the city funded a $100,000 update to its water and sewer master plan. None of this is alarming on its own. It matters on a call because a contractor arriving at a wet building needs to know quickly whether he is looking at supply water, sewer water or rain, and in a town where the sewer system is mid-rebuild, that question deserves a real answer instead of an assumption.

Karst under the Central Plateau

The flatter Central Plateau that Mountain Home sits on is known for karst. Under the yards and the slabs is shallow, irregular limestone, cut through with sinkholes and dissolved-rock voids near the surface. Two things follow from that for a wet building. The first is structural: foundations over karst are exposed to uneven settling, and occasionally to a void that opens beneath them. The second is drainage. Surface and storm water here disappears underground and comes back out at springs with very little natural filtering, so what runs off a parking lot does not necessarily stay where it went in.

Inside a house, that shows up as water arriving from the wrong direction. A leak at one end of a slab wets carpet at the other because the water has followed the top of the rock rather than sinking. Crawl spaces sitting on ledge hold standing water in the hollows long after the surface looks dry. A drying plan built on the assumption of uniform soil under the floor will read low on the meter and still leave a wet pocket.

Cold, and buildings nobody is standing in

During the February 14 to 20, 2021 arctic outbreak the city took eight to ten inches of snow on the fourteenth and fifteenth and hit a low of 6 degrees on February 15. That is the profile that precedes a pipe-bursting wave: not one cold night, but a week of it, long enough for the cold to reach lines in exterior walls, unheated attics and crawl spaces that never see freezing in a normal winter. The break usually announces itself on the rebound, when the ice in the split line melts and the line starts pushing water.

The January 26 to 28, 2009 ice storm did it a different way. One to two inches of ice, the worst icing here since December 2000, with a trained spotter near town logging heavy freezing rain and extensive tree and limb damage from about six in the morning on January 27. When the power goes and stays gone in that weather, the furnace stops and the house cools to the outdoor temperature over a day or two. Retiree households and lake-area second homes make up a real share of the local housing stock, and an empty house has nobody to notice the heat has quit.

Big buildings, and the roads out of town

Mountain Home is not only houses. Baxter Regional Medical Center, founded in 1963, employs roughly a thousand people, and Arkansas State University-Mountain Home opened in 2000 and enrolls about 1,500 students. The Baxter County Courthouse, a WPA-era building on the National Register, anchors downtown; the same Depression-era program built the Henderson Bridge and a Highway 5 bridge in the county. Buildings on that scale flood differently from houses — the water moves down through floors and along cable and pipe chases, and the job is usually as much about keeping the place running as about drying it.

The city is where US-62 and US-412 run together and where Arkansas Highway 5, the only continuous north-south state highway in the county, crosses them. No interstate serves Baxter County at all. Gassville is about seven miles west on US-62B and Cotter about ten by the same business route, so 72653, 72635 and 72626 sit in a row along ten miles of one road. That road geometry is why crews here think in terms of the US-62 corridor rather than exit numbers, and why a call from Clarkridge or Big Flat is a longer drive than the map distance suggests.

What people ask before calling

Call while the damage is still doing whatever it is doing. It gets easier, not harder, to fix early.