Flooding Facts: How Water Affects Your White River Home’s Structural Integrity

11/19/2018 (Permalink)

Water and wood don't mix. Call SERVPRO to restore your home after a water incident.

How Flood Damage in White River Junction Affects Higher Levels of a Home

Flooding washes a land's features away and changes it drastically. It can do much the same to homes in White River Junction. The force of the water involved can become extremely strong, and the pressure behind its mass can also force timbers to move from their original location.  

The damage to wooden structures from a flood in White River Junction worsens as the flooding increases. When wood swells, it can suffer changes to its shape, by curving or twisting. These changes can also affect your home's other levels when they lose their original angles. Twisting internally, at even slight amounts, can cause cracking along seams and corners.  

SERVPRO technicians realize that getting your home's previous dry condition restored quickly means many of these changes in the internal structure can revert to normal. Once this happens, minor repairs can suffice in making your house “Like it never even happened.” Instead of significant patching of gaping cracks in corners to close up holes, only small amounts of work, such as sanding and minor repainting, sufficiently clears up any mess.  

Our equipment handles extracting any leftover water from lower areas of your property and gets them ready for our drying machinery. Opening windows and doors so that air can move more freely, might occur, but only should the air outside be drier than the air inside. Our powerful air movers pull moisture from out of concrete and brick areas of your home. These slightly porous materials hold onto water they absorbed much more than softer materials tend to do. Getting it out of these more difficult materials helps immensely toward drying out the entire house. Our IICRC-certified technicians measure moisture content levels in different materials, starting when we first arrive so that we can accurately track our progress.  

As the air moves more forcefully through your home, the removal of damaged drywall and other wall materials means air can flow through areas that it could not before. This air movement causes dry areas inside upper walls which works in our favor to counteract evaporation and condensation. Trapped moisture is not a welcome aspect of flood damage mitigation. We also use desiccant machines to extract the moisture from the air, steadily decreases the amount of moisture in your property.  

SERVPRO of Windham & Windsor Counties can help get your home back to normal again after flood damage causes untold harm. We understand that your house in Woodstock, Stratton, or Springfield can suffer in many ways, and that time is of the essence. Call us at (802) 674-8004, so we can start working on the mitigation and restoration needed immediately after a flooding incident. We are available whenever you call.

The Center for Cartoon Studies is located in White River Junction. Click here for more information.