After the deluge

The night their house flooded, Deirdre and Clayton Cobb awoke to the sound of crackling from their clock radio and the steady patter of what sounded like raindrops falling on a swimming pool.

But the Rancho Palos Verdes residents don’t have a swimming pool, and when Clayton got up to investigate, he literally received the shock of his life.

Stepping into knee-deep water that was pouring in through a window, Clayton, the senior pastor at St. Peter’s By the Sea Presbyterian Church, was jolted back onto the bed from an electrical shock administered by the waterlogged but still plugged-in radio.

Clayton wasn’t badly hurt, but the couple soon experienced a different shock -- the realization that the lower level of their house had been destroyed in the early hours of Feb. 19 as they’d slept.

It’s now nearly three months since the torrential rains flooded the Cobbs’ house, but like thousands of other Southland homeowners, they are still working to repair their water-soaked home.

The second-wettest Southern California winter in over a century has wreaked more than $100 million in property damage and led to federal disaster declarations in Los Angeles and several other counties for two of the most severe periods.

The relentless rainy season also has meant that consumers have turned to pumping firms, contractors, mold inspectors and companies that specialize in repairing water damage to dry out their walls, floors and furniture. In an emergency, fast action by a competent outfit can save a homeowner thousands of dollars down the road on everything from mold eradication to replacing floor boards and rotten beams. But for every company that knows what it’s doing, there are other less qualified ones just as eager to take the job.

In short, let the dryer beware.

“After a disaster there are always those who come out of the woodwork to prey on vulnerable people,” said Pamela Mares, an information officer with the Contractors State License Board. “We always warn people, ‘Don’t jump into things, make sure your contractor is licensed, and don’t take the first bid.’ ”

On Feb. 20, fewer than 48 hours after the Cobbs’ home was inundated, Cassandra Peterson was having dinner at a neighbor’s house on her gated street in a low-lying area of the Hollywood Hills when a small convoy of fire department vehicles drove by around 10 p.m.

Peterson, an actress best known for her long-running Elvira character, has been sparring with the city of Los Angeles for years over runoff problems, so the uneasiness she said she felt at the steady downpour turned into anxiety when the fire trucks stopped at her house. A turbulent river of water, mud and hillside debris was filling up her pool, patio and garage and collecting in the crawl space beneath her house.

“Basically, the firemen told me, ‘You’ve got to get somebody up here to start pumping water. Right now,’ ” Peterson recalled. “I started frantically going through the phone book.”

Less concerned about getting an initial bid than staunching the flow that was nearing her living room windows, Peterson said she was thrilled just to get someone on the phone.

But before they would do the job, Peterson said the representative on the phone insisted she sign an invoice promising to pay for the work, whatever the cost.

Peterson said she at first resisted signing what was essentially a blank check. Failure to provide a written estimate is in fact against the law in California, according to Mares. But with the rain pouring down and the water rising, Peterson relented.

Over the next several hours, a solitary worker pumped an estimated 10,000 gallons of water out of Peterson’s basement and backyard. Early the next morning, she handed over a $6,000 payment for the pumping work. When a skeptical contractor friend made a few calls, several companies quoted estimates of $600 to $800 for the job.

Concluding that she’d been had, Peterson stopped payment on her check. On the advice of her accountant, she eventually paid $3,000.

Getting rid of the standing water was just the beginning of Peterson’s problems. In addition to major damage to her pool, patio, outside electrical wiring and air conditioning and heating system, it quickly became apparent that her plaster walls and even her ceilings were wicking up moisture from below.

Fearful of potentially hazardous mold and irreversible damage to her home’s wood frame, Peterson’s next call was to several companies that specialize in eliminating moisture after flooding. “They were all over the map. One company said they’d come in and just set up some fans for a few days and another practically wanted to demolish my entire house,” Peterson said. “I settled on something in the middle.”

She hired North Hollywood-based Coast to Coast Water Damage & Restoration, which carefully checked every room with moisture meters to find the wet spots and then drilled hundreds of roughly 2-inch-diameter holes in the affected areas. More than 1,000 feet of wall and ceiling space took on the appearance of giant slabs of Swiss cheese.

Dehumidifiers were placed at strategic locations around Peterson’s house, and tubes from a massive air injector were placed in the holes for several hours at a time. The high-tech blow-dry took several days and cost more than $5,000. Repainting and plastering will cost an additional $10,000 or so.

Yet setting up air-moving equipment and dehumidifiers in a flooded home won’t necessarily end water and mold problems, said Hayko Aldzhikyan, director of operations for Coast to Coast.

“If there is moisture inside the wall or ceiling and there’s insulation, you can put fans on the wall all you want but it won’t dry the insulation,” he said. “That moisture can lead to mold later on.”

She was right to take care of it quickly. The $5,000 that Peterson paid to have her home dried out would have been closer to $25,000, according to Aldzhikyan, if she had waited until mold spores formed.

When mold enters the equation, the costs associated with drying out a house can rise dramatically. And Scott Beckman, owner of Santa Clarita-based Home Integrity Property Inspection, said there are many outfits that claim to be experts that aren’t qualified to do the job right. If mold isn’t completely wiped out, the remaining spores can spread and the homeowner will have to do another clean-up.

Beckman, who’s had a busy winter and spring rushing from one water-damaged property to the next, advises that homeowners select an inspector certified by the nonprofit Indoor Environmental Standards Organization. Although certification is not required to perform inspections, it signals that the company is in compliance with standards developed by a national panel of health and real estate professionals.

He also warns against using companies that offer to do both inspection and remediation. A trustworthy inspector will avoid potential conflicts by refraining from even recommending a company to do the mold cleanup, he said. A home mold analysis should run anywhere from $200 to $600, he estimated, depending on the size of the area.

“You’ve got to do your homework,” Beckman said. “You don’t want to hire some yahoo who’s doing it part time and doesn’t know what they are doing.”

As Deirdre Cobb tells it, she and her husband didn’t have the slightest idea how to begin cleaning up after water poured into the lower level of their house from a window in the wee hours of Feb. 19.

By the time the sun was up, the three rooms in the lower part of the house were swamped, with water reaching the fourth step of the stairs and their previously nailed-down wall-to-wall carpet floating at thigh level.

A firefighter friend helped arrange for a county fire crew to pump water out of the part of the patio where it had pooled. Then, adopting a do-it-yourself approach, friends and family members spent several days removing debris and pushing giant squeegees around the affected area.

The Cobbs also hired a team of laborers to help clean the mud and debris from their house and backyard, but they sent them off after one day when their work ethic proved less than satisfactory.

Meanwhile, the Cobbs invested $1,000 to buy four 30-pint dehumidifiers and borrowed another from a friend. Those five machines -- each capable of handling a small room -- ran virtually around the clock for weeks.

Even with that, an environmental inspector determined that areas of the house were still soaked. The entire bottom floor of the house and many of their belongings in that area were destroyed.

Like Peterson and most other Southern California homeowners, the Cobbs have an insurance policy that covers water damage from rain falling on their roof, as well as leaks caused by structural defects, clogged pipes, broken appliances and the like, but does not cover floods. Flood insurance must be purchased separately.

The Cobbs and Peterson both said they intend to file damage claims with their respective cities to recover their expenses because their problems were caused by street drainage.

Peterson’s water problems are complicated by the fact that the upper portion of her street is the city’s responsibility, while the section Peterson lives on is a private drive. After years of unfulfilled written promises from the city to widen the drain, which overflows just about every time it rains and sends water gushing into her property, Peterson said she was told last month that the problem would be fixed in 2006.

The Cobbs, on the other hand, say a poorly maintained storm drain at the bottom of a steep ravine caused their troubles. Their house sits a little lower than the drain, and when it clogged during the storm the water spilled across a road and onto their property.

The Cobbs said the city of Rancho Palos Verdes has been cooperative, and they’ve been given until August to submit a bill. They plan to use all the allotted time, so they can get reimbursed for expenses that might still come up.

Another possible avenue of help is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

About two months after the February storms, the Bush administration declared a state of emergency for Los Angeles County and other counties hit hard by rainfall during Feb. 16-23. (One had been declared earlier for the storms in late December and January.)

Affected homeowners can file for low-interest repair loans and reimbursements for emergency work.

Peterson estimated that she’s spent nearly $50,000 clearing debris and drying out her house. By the time everything is repaired, that total will probably more than double.

The Cobbs have spent just a fraction of that handling their drying-out process mostly on their own. But their costs are likely to skyrocket when they get around to rebuilding the bottom floor of their house.

Until then, they’ve moved upstairs into a spare bedroom.

“Well, we wanted to redo the lower level anyway,” said Deirdre Cobb. “You’ve got to put some kind of positive spin on it or you’ll just shoot yourself.”

Darrell Satzman is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer. He can be reached at satzman@earthlink.net.