Water damage restoration and cleaning in Fair Lawn, NJ

In the remnants of Hurricane Ida the borough told roughly 200 more families than usual to evacuate.

That was 1 September 2021. The Passaic gauge nearest the borough read 8.25 feet, more than a foot above flood stage, and the National Weather Service forecast a crest of 14.2 feet. River Road closed north west of Maple Avenue and south beyond Morlot Avenue through to the Elmwood Park line. Across Bergen County that night the Hackensack, the Saddle and the Passaic all passed flood stage together, and the borough plans for evacuation.

What to do before you leave and after you come back

If an evacuation is called, the photographs are the thing most often forgotten and the thing worth most later. Two minutes of pictures of every room, every floor covering and every item on the first floor is a better record than anything an adjuster can reconstruct afterwards. Shut the water off at the main and the power at the panel if it is safe and dry to reach. On returning, do not walk into standing water where the power may still be on, and do not start moving furniture before the rooms have been photographed again as found.

Radburn and the 1920s stock are their own problem

Fair Lawn holds 1800s Victorian houses, the Radburn planned community laid out in 1929, and a large band of housing built between the 1920s and the 1960s. The older and interwar stock is plaster on lath over deep cavities with hardwood on board subfloor, which the ANSI IICRC S500 standard treats as class 4 material because it holds water inside the assembly and releases it slowly. Postwar Fair Lawn houses dry considerably faster. Two neighboring streets can be three days apart on the same flood for that reason alone.

River water and the carpet question

Water off the Passaic or the Saddle is category 3 grossly contaminated water under the S500 standard, so carpet, pad, porous subfloor and the wet band of drywall come out. The reason is that the water crossed streets and drainage before it reached the house and drying it in place fixes what it carried into the room.

Where the water came from a failed supply line inside the house instead, it is category 1 and much of the room is normally dried in place. The difference is stated at the door with the reason written on the estimate, because a homeowner who is told the same wet carpet is treated two different ways deserves to know why.

Rebuilding after a flood in a fluvial area

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection adopted the Inland Flood Protection Rule on 17 July 2023. It raised the design flood elevation for habitable first floors by two feet in fluvial flood areas and requires flood elevation calculations to use future rainfall projections. On a River Road property that is a live question.

The right time to raise it is with the borough construction office before a rebuild is designed, not after the drywall is up. This business dries, remediates and cleans, and it says plainly where a question belongs to a contractor, a plumber or the municipality.

Mold after two days of standing water

Where a house has been evacuated and the water stood for a day or more, the Environmental Protection Agency window of 24 to 48 hours for drying has already closed, and the plan is removal and structural drying. Remediation follows ANSI IICRC S520 and names the condition found: normal fungal ecology, settled spores and fragments, or actual growth.

Containment, negative air pressure and HEPA filtration keep the work inside the affected area. Post remediation verification is provided in writing. New Jersey issues no state mold license, so IICRC certification is the credential that applies and nothing beyond it. The estimate is free and written before work begins with no hidden fees, and the business has been family owned since 2010. Carpet, rug and upholstery cleaning is done by the same technicians once the structure is dry. A wool rug lifted off a wet floor is dried flat and fully before it goes back down, and upholstery is cleaned to the W, S, WS or X code the manufacturer printed on its own label.