After the Arkansas or Lee Creek has been in the building

Flood cleanup is not the same trade as drying a burst pipe. The water was dirty, it stood for a while, and it left a layer of river silt behind on every surface it touched. What follows describes the work in the order it happens on a Van Buren address that took water from the river or the creek.

What the 2019 water was carrying

The Arkansas near Van Buren crested at 40.79 feet on June 1, 2019, 18.79 feet above flood stage and past the 1945 record of 38.1 feet, in what the USGS put near a one-in-200-year event with peak flow around 570,000 cubic feet per second. Water moving that fast over that much ground picks up soil, road runoff, fuel, farm chemicals and whatever was stored in the outbuildings it passed. It is treated as contaminated from the outset, regardless of how clear it looks standing in a room.

Lee Creek delivered its own version on the same days, cresting at 416.40 feet on May 28 and 416.90 on June 1, then again at 407.20 on June 23. Creek water in this city arrives faster and carries more coarse material, so it tends to leave heavier silt and debris in a shorter time.

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 order of the work

Standing water comes out first, by pump for depth and by extractor for what is in the carpet and against the walls. Then the silt. Silt is the difference between flood work and every other kind of water job: it settles into carpet backing, into the gaps between floorboards, into the bottom of wall cavities, and it has to be physically removed rather than dried in place. Dried silt is just dust with everything the river was carrying still in it.

Porous materials that took the water do not stay. Carpet and pad, wet fiberglass insulation, particleboard cabinet bases and the lower band of paper-faced drywall come out. Drywall is usually cut above the visible water line, high enough to reach material that stayed dry, because water wicks upward well past where the tidemark shows. Framing, masonry, concrete and solid wood generally stay, get cleaned down, get disinfected and then get dried under equipment.

Only then does drying start in earnest, and it takes longer than owners expect because the structure absorbed water for days rather than hours. Where a building sat over standing water in a crawl space, the underside of the floor system is often wetter than anything visible upstairs.

Two rises, one house

The single most useful thing to know about river flooding here is that it comes in waves. In 2019 the Arkansas fell after June 1 and then came back to crest at 27.06 feet between June 23 and 27, with extensive lowland flooding, while Lee Creek rose again the same week. Any drying done in between was undone.

That is why timing matters as much as method on a bottoms address. Tearing out and rebuilding while the river is still capable of another rise wastes the work. Drying, sanitizing and holding the building open until the gauge is genuinely falling is slower and cheaper. A crew that tells you to wait a week is sometimes giving you the more expensive advice to hear and the less expensive one to follow.

Mud, safety and the practical limits

Power should be off in any part of a building that took water until someone qualified says otherwise, and any question about how contact with floodwater might affect a person belongs to a physician rather than a restoration contractor. On the building side, the real hazards are simpler: sagging saturated ceilings, floors softened over a wet crawl space, and unseen debris under the mud.

Some of this work is genuinely a homeowner job. A few inches of water in a detached metal shop with a concrete floor mostly needs a squeegee, a hose, a stiff brush and a couple of days of open doors. Where it stops being that is when the water got into a wall, under a floor, or into a building somebody sleeps in.

Questions and answers

The sooner a dehumidifier is running, the shorter the list of things that have to come out.