Flash Flood Cleanup in San Marcos, TX
The rain started after dark and by two in the morning the sirens along the Blanco were going. When it got light, there was a brown line eighteen inches up the garage wall, silt across the kitchen floor, and the smell of river in every room. The water went down almost as fast as it came up, which is how flash floods work here. What it left behind does not leave on its own. This site passes your call to an independent local provider who does flash flood cleanup in San Marcos and across Hays County.
Pumping river silt out of a slab house, and what has to leave with it
The crew treats floodwater as contaminated, because it is. River and street water carries silt, fuel from parked cars, septic overflow, and whatever the storm drains collected. Standing water is pumped out and the mud shoveled and vacuumed off the slab. Then the materials that absorbed it come out: carpet and pad, the lower section of drywall and the insulation behind it, particleboard cabinet bases, and anything made of fiberboard. Those cannot be cleaned to a safe condition and are not worth trying.
What remains, the slab, the studs, the tile, and solid wood, gets washed, treated, and then dried with structural drying equipment. The crew works in protective gear and keeps a clean path through the house so the mud does not travel into the dry rooms.
Before you go back inside after the water drops
Wait until the power to the house has been checked. Do not wade through standing water in a room with outlets below the water line. Wear boots and gloves. Photograph the high-water line on the walls, every room, and the yard before anything is moved. Open doors and windows if it is dry outside. Keep children and pets out until the floors are cleaned. Then call, and say the water came from outside.
Contents: what gets cleaned and what gets photographed and bagged
Hard, non-porous items such as metal, glass, sealed ceramics, and plastic can usually be cleaned and kept. Upholstered furniture, mattresses, rugs, and paper that soaked in floodwater generally cannot. Solid wood furniture is a case-by-case call. Photograph everything that leaves with the mud still on it, because an adjuster or a disaster program will want to see the condition before disposal, not after.
Flash Flood Alley runs straight through Hays County
San Marcos sits where Hill Country creeks meet the Blackland Prairie, and that is why the Blanco rises so fast. On May 24, 2015, the river crested at 43.08 feet at San Marcos after sitting below 15 feet the evening before, and the Wimberley gauge upstream was later estimated at 44.9 feet. Blanco Gardens, along the river's east bank, took the worst of it. On October 30, 2015, the All Saints flood brought the Blanco to 37.24 feet at Kyle and closed I-35 at the river bridge. The city later counted 1,558 housing units damaged across those two events, nearly 1,250 of them in Blanco Gardens.
The Blanco is not the only water. Purgatory Creek, Sink Creek, and Willow Springs Creek run through town and flood streets in a two-inch hour, and the San Marcos River itself backs up where the Blanco joins it below town. The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority posts river conditions for the whole basin, and its gauges are the ones to watch when rain sets up over Wimberley.
Two things to know about paying for it. A standard Texas homeowners policy almost never covers water that came in from outside; that takes a separate flood policy, and claims on those are documented the same careful way. And if the water came from a pipe inside the house rather than the river, it is a water extraction job with different rules about what can stay, so tell the crew which one happened.
Call when the water goes down
Say how high the water got, which rooms it reached, and whether it came from the river, a creek, or the street. Tell us whether the power is on and whether anyone is still in the house. Call (737) 283-4979 and describe what you see.
