Water damage can hit a home hard, taking the structure and the personal space within it to the very edge. When you look at the flooded rooms, your first instinct is to fire up the pumps and blowers, but for the kind of disaster the basement took, such actions aren't enough. And they could even do more harm than good, because it's not enough anymore to simply dry the rooms: every part of your house must be returned to its pristine state to truly regain any kind of notion of family. A fully dry house--including the floors, walls, and beams inside of it--is the goal. A re-done dry house does not equal a re-done family, but the methods of achieving it do subsume the very personal nature of your home. The task calls for a structural engineer and, yes, a bit of funky equipment.
Different types of structures call for different solutions. Think of your home as uniquely asking for its own moisture-removal plan. Lightweight walls could need gentle warmth to coax out the moisture, while more robust parts of the house might need turbocharged air movers to do the same, as well as dehumidifiers (more on that later). Moisture removal is a simple equation: warm, dry air in, wet, cool air out. When you think about how to achieve that, you can go in one of two "directions.
The community is not merely about sharing our "how-to" life manuals; it is also, and perhaps more importantly, about sharing our experiences and the wisdom they afford us. That might not seem revolutionary, but it was a powerfully liberating idea in Mead. We had taken to heart the old adage about leaning on local wisdom and had come, in some respects, to revere that wisdom. More than schoolrooms, tools, or even how-to manuals, we had come to see the power and the potential of stories—those tales told by our friends and neighbors, who had survived the same disasters we were facing.
