Emergency
Storm Surge & Tidal Flooding Bartow, FL
Surge and tidal water rise from the ground up and carry salt and silt with them. Anything porous they soaked is treated as contaminated. Outside water that rose into the building is treated as contaminated, and porous material it reached is removed. Salt left behind in materials keeps pulling water from the air, so it is cleaned out with the rest.
Switch off the air handler if it is dripping
Often needed alongside
- Emergency Water Extraction
Standing water removed before it soaks into slab, block and flooring - the first step after any failure, and the one humid air makes urgent.
- Wind-Driven Rain Intrusion
Wind pushes rain sideways through window frames, stucco and the base of the wall. The roof can hold and the house still take water.
- Sewer & Septic Backflow Cleanup
Heavy rain and a high water table can push sewage back through the lowest drain in the building. Clear or murky, it is handled as sewage.
Frequently asked questions
What wets the floor around the air handler closet in an older Bartow house?
Often the refrigerant lines. In some late-1970s houses with the air handler in an interior closet, the copper lines run under or through the slab to reach it. The larger of the two carries cold gas, and once its foam insulation wears thin it runs colder than the concrete around it, so water forms on it all summer and spreads into the slab and the floor covering nearest the closet.
Can a sunken living room in a Bartow house stay damp?
It can. A late-1970s house with a sunken living room has that floor set a step lower than the rest of the slab, a few inches closer to the soil outside. Through the humid months that lower slab runs cooler and takes up more moisture from below, and the strip along the step, where carpet tack strip and baseboard meet the concrete, is usually where the damp shows first.
What does Bartow's ground mean for a damp slab?
Bartow's center stands about 118 feet above sea level, well above any tide, and the town grew up near the dead-waters of the Peace River in the 1850s. A slab on that higher ground is seldom wet from the sea, so a damp floor is worth tracing first to the cooling system's lines and drain, and to the water supply pipes in the walls nearest it.
Back to Bartow for the housing and weather behind them.