After the water: what has to be replaced in a flooded house

When a house has taken water, the electrical questions arrive in the wrong order. People want to know when the power can go back on, and the honest answer is that it is the last question rather than the first.

Crown Electric worked through a long stretch of whole-house restorations in Beaumont after Hurricane Harvey. The single thing worth passing on from that work is this: flood damage to electrical equipment is not a drying problem. It is a replacement problem.

Why drying it out does not work

It is a reasonable assumption that if you dry something thoroughly it goes back to how it was. With electrical equipment that assumption does not hold, for two reasons.

The first is that floodwater is not clean water. It carries silt, sewage, fuel, and dissolved salts, and it leaves all of that behind as it dries. What stays inside a breaker or a device is a conductive, corrosive residue sitting on contacts and insulation.

The second is that this equipment is not built to be opened, inspected and reconditioned. A breaker is a sealed mechanical device with a specific job: to open reliably when a fault happens, possibly years from now. Once it has been submerged, nobody can look at it and tell you it will still do that. It may work perfectly today and fail to trip on the day it matters.

What generally has to come out

• The panel and its breakers, if the water reached them. This is the first and biggest question in any flooded house.
• The meter base if water got into it, which involves the utility as well.
• Every outlet, switch and light fitting below the water line, along with their boxes.
• Cable that was submerged. Water travels along the inside of a cable sheath well past where the water line appears on the wall.
• Hardwired appliances that took water: cooling equipment, water heaters, ovens, disposal units.
• Protective devices anywhere near the water line, which are electronic and unforgiving about submersion.

The point that surprises people most is the last part of the cable item. The visible tide mark on the wall is not the boundary of the damage, because a cable will wick water upward inside its sheath. Deciding where to cut back is judgement, and it is a large part of what you are paying an experienced contractor for.

The order the work runs in

Power off and confirmed off first, at the meter, with the utility involved where it needs to be. Nothing else happens until that is settled.

Then assessment: how high did it get, what did it reach, and what is the actual line between replace and keep. Then the strip-out, which usually has to happen alongside whatever is being done about drywall and insulation, because the two trades are pulling at the same walls.

Then the rebuild. New boxes, new devices, new cable where it was cut back, a new panel where the old one is gone. Then inspection, and only then does the power come back on. A house that has merely had the power restored is not the same thing as a house that has been restored.

What good work looks like at the end

One customer described a Crown Electric crew doing exactly this job on her house: several electricians and an apprentice working through a whole-house restoration after Harvey, patient about questions and about the work that got added along the way, and finishing with new and restored lighting throughout.

That is the shape of a restoration done properly. It takes longer than anybody wants, it involves more replacement than anybody hoped, and it ends with a house that will pass an inspection rather than one that merely has power again.

If it happens again

Do not switch anything back on to test it. Do not enter standing water in a building that may still be energised. Get the supply confirmed off, and get somebody licensed to look at the panel before anything else is decided.

Crown Electric has worked in Beaumont since 1979 under TECL #17720 and covers Beaumont, Port Arthur, Orange and the surrounding Golden Triangle. Call (409) 842-1306, with emergency service available outside the Monday to Friday office hours.