 We're going to enter our flooded house for the first time but before we go in we're going to have a walk around to make sure that things are reasonably structural sound. There's always some danger. You never can be absolutely sure but you can be fairly sure with a modern house by walking around, looking at the foundation, looking at the lines on the house that the house hasn't suffered any major structural damage. So that's what we're going to do first and then we'll go inside and we'll look to see what we've got left in there and what's messy and what has to be cleaned up. So let's just get started. The house obviously was all sandbagged and so looking at the foundation in the front is going to be very difficult until all of that is taken away but we can see it at the most exposed point which is around on the other side of the house. So we'll go on over there and we'll have a look and we'll see what it looks like. In this particular case the foundation is poured concrete which is what I would have expected and this is a relatively modern house I suspect 20 years old or so and we've taken the sandbags away. We've taken the plastic off the wall and we can see that the window has been forced in by the pressure of the water and undoubtedly that's one of the points that water got into the basement but the basement looks normal. There's some little hairline cracks. There's a tiny little crack here but that probably was not caused by anything to do with the flood. So the foundation looks secure. The house looks square. The rough lines are all as they should be. They're nice and neat. There's no dips, no bulges in the walls so so far the house looks great. Coming around on the backside of the house and you can see on the plastic that there's a line right about here which is the maximum height to the water and so the water never got very high on the walls of this house but it certainly submerged the whole basement. One of the other things that we want to check as we go around the house is was the electricity and the gas turned off and in this case the gas enters the house right here and this valve is on so the homeowner did not shut the gas valve off at the house but in this case the gas valve is shut off out in the backyard at the meter. We've already checked that. The difficulty with the electricity is a lot of people look to see if the disk is turning as an indication that the power is on but that is not an indication that the power is on. That's just an indication of whether you're actually using power or not so your trouble is that you must call a power company if you're in town ask them if the power has been cut off and usually out at the pole is where they cut the power off and in this case that's what they have already done. The switch has been thrown at the transformer so all the electricity is off in this house but don't go by anything you see at this meter. If you wanted to check in this case you could remove this screw and take off this faceplate. This happens to be the breaker box for the air conditioner and if you had a test light you could check on the points up above and see whether there was any voltage. If there was well then obviously you've still got power on to the house but that's one place on the outside. Now that we've completed our walk around the outside it's time to go in and as you can see we've already started some preparations. One of the things we want to do is get some ventilation in this house as quickly as possible so we're going to leave the door open. As we go in we want to be cautious. We don't know what the floor was made of and so we want to test first to see if the floor seems solid. The floors in some of the houses may have been made of particle board or chip board so-called and flooding them for a few days to a week or more like this one has been flooded will soften them up to the point where you'll be able to feel that the floor is no longer solid. If it is you want to proceed very cautiously and if it seems extreme you want to lay boards down over the joist which run crossways to the room so that you can enter safely and get in. The other thing you want to do is you want to look up. If the house has been seriously flooded and we'll see it in the basement the water will have soaked up the plasterboard and it may have already started to collapse. That's a real danger to you because the plasterboard is so heavy that it can do you some serious damage if it falls down on your head. In this particular case the flooding was only about five inches deep maximum was down in this range somewhere and the plasterboard even seems reasonably solid clear down at the base of the wall. The big trouble here is this rug it's holding moisture and it's keeping it on that floor which is no help at all it's doing continued damage. Let's go down in the basement because that's where the major damage should have taken place because we know that this house was completely flooded up to the at least the first floor level. Down here we can see we've got a real mess. If we look over here we'll see the walls are bulged. This is this is paneling when it gets wet it expands it was placed in there tight it has no place to go except the bulge and that's what you see here. As you look up you see that the ceiling has caved in in many places in other places the suspended ceiling has sagged very badly and those sheets though very light when dry are fairly heavy right now and you can see there's toys and cards and everything else stuck on the ceiling so obviously the water was clear up there and really gave everything a good soak. You can see that it's only been about 10 days but already we've got some gross started on the wood and so we've got to get that dried out as soon as possible to stop that from deteriorating still further and this is one of the reasons we want to get those rugs off upstairs that are still as wet as they can be. As we can see here cabinets fell down cupboards and things fell down that were full of toys and of course much of this stuff may have floated it's impossible to see what's underneath some of those tremendous piles of material but you can see that there's a cabinet laying down there there's a laundry basket and as you notice we have a freezer or a freezer refrigerator down here that obviously floated and is now lying on top of a overstuffed chair and so forth and just general chaos everywhere. Look I just fell through the wall and you can see how soft that plasterboard is it just comes apart in your hands nothing left. Now Dick that's a really a good idea to pull that off so you can get the wood dried out. It is true in fact this whole basement's got to be stripped you've got to get the paneling off the wall you've got to get all this plasterboard off the wall you've got to get the paper out but you've got to get this stuff off the floor first so I don't want to tear down the wall until the floor gets cleaned. Over in here is the utility room and as you can see the washer and dryer have both been completely submerged the washer floated out of position because it's got a waterproof tub in it and both appliances are ruined. As we enter another room in the basement you can see that there's a piece of ceiling right here on the floor so then when you look up you can see precisely what we were concerned about upstairs when we talked about entering the house if that ceiling board gets submerged it's very up to get so soft that it can't stand its own weight and it'll fall down. This happens to be heating duct so it's not too bad but all the rest of this is plasterboard and needs to be approached with some caution obviously on the floor we have a rug that's holding mud dirt and we have the mattress still from the bed and a little desk and a number of other things around everything in the room is pretty much spoiled there's a few items could be salvaged but pretty much needs to be just cleaned up and all of this plasterboard walls torn down all the paneling taken off the walls. Now the videotape we've just seen raises a number of questions first of all let's talk about the protective clothing that all of you had on the boots the mask the gloves is all that necessary dick? Well it certainly is if you care about your own health after all you don't really know what's in there this has been flooded with surface water what's in the surface water is very hard to tell but we know that lagoons were flooded that sewers backed up that all kinds of material has gotten into that water and there's just no sense in taking a chance I realize there's always a possibility that people want to be macho and just wade in and do it but it's much better to protect yourself. You talked about stripping off the paneling and the wallboard I guess what's the state of the the material underneath it the studs the joists the studs and joists if you can get them dry relatively quickly rock will not continue and so the whole idea and in this business with flooded houses is to strip it out as all the things that have been damaged strip them out as quickly as possible particularly those things that hold water like rugs on the floor and insulation in the walls get in there get that material out so you can get it dry the sooner you get it dry the less mold mildew and rock you'll have and the less odors and other problems that you'll have also