Danger of Flood Water?

Meadmaker

Unregistered
Meadmaker
Joined
Apr 27, 2004
Messages
29,033
Here in Michigan, we just experienced a flood - well, sort of.

It was a very "suburban" sort of disaster. No one died. No one was left homeless. (Well, maybe one or two people in each category, but not much.) Primarily, there was a lot of property damage, most of it in the form of finished and furnished basements that got a lot of water in them. My own home had about 30 inches.

It was a simple enough story to tell. Very heavy rains overstressed the local sewer system, and they started to run backwards, filling our basements with sewer water flowing up from floor drains, toilets, showers, and sinks. Very unpleasant. it lasted a very short time. it started flooding around 7:00 pm. By midnight, the basement had drained.

But residue remained. It was filthy. Mud everywhere.

In the days since, we were inundated again, this time with a barrage of health warnings.

And that is what brings me (back) to a skeptics' forum. Does anyone have any knowledge of how bad is it, really?

We have been told that if it hit the water, it should be thrown out. The health risks can't be overstated, at least if you believe the loudest voices. Clothing, furniture, documents. They all have to go.

I'm skeptical. Yes, we threw away (almost) every book that was flooded. Yes, we cut away all wet drywall. We threw fans on the exposed studs to prevent mold growth. We sprayed down with sanitizer from a professional company. Sofas with foam cushions....gone. But I have been told that isn't enough.

For anything I felt like saving, I took a whole bunch of bleach to it. Camp furniture. Backpacks. Dishes. Bookcases (wood, not particle board. The particle board one were tossed. The piles of trash in our suburb were truly impressive.) Some people say that we are risking our lives by holding on to it.

Is it really as bad as all that? Does anyone have any knowledge not gained from a voice of hysteria on the 11:00 news?

The way I see it, that muck on my floor was not human waste. It was mud. Unfortunately, there was undoubtedly some human waste mixed in. However, I have raised an infant. I've been around human waste. I have pets. I go camping. I've been around animal waste. I've stepped in dog poop and I didn't throw out my shoes. I clean. I bleach. I put it back in my house.

I'm a little bit squeamish about anything with foam. We have some hockey gear that was soaked in bleach, and I must admit I'm a bit nervous about it. On the other hand, if the waste water could get to it, so could the bleach water. Surely if it doesn't smell funny, it ought to be ok, shouldn't it?

A common response to such lines of inquiry is, "Why take a chance?" Well, it's the same reason I let my kid drive, and walk home after dark. Yes, something bad could happen, but if you live your life in fear, something bad has already happened. I'm willing to take a tiny bit of reasonable risk.

So, does anyone think I'm being way too non-chalant about the dangers of this contaminated stuff. Is there any source of reasonable and prudent dangers and precautions that isn't, "Throw it all away."

Or are the voices of alarm correct. Are we really an epidemic waiting to happen?
 
I don't really know either. But I am also from the same area.

About the human waste part, it might depend on which suburb you live in. A lot of the older ones don't have separate storm and sewer drains, which means there can be quite a bit of contamination. (Berkley seems to have gotten the worst of the flooding and is older than most 'burbs near Detroit. I don't know if they are separated or not.)

When those same common drainage systems have been overwhelmed in the past it lead to some untreated sewage getting dumped into the Clinton river and that resulted in Metro Beach on Lake St. Clair being closed.

Depending on which burb you are in, they might need to take some of those warnings more seriously.

I don't have to worry much myself. I am in western Wayne county and my condo is on a slab. But I was tempted to take a kayak to the I-75 and 696 interchange.......
 
Last edited:
Doubt said:
I don't really know either. But I am also from the same area.

About the human waste part, it might depend on which suburb you live in. A lot of the older ones don't have separate storm and sewer drains, which means there can be quite a bit of contamination. (Berkley seems to have gotten the worst of the flooding and is older than most 'burbs near Detroit. I don't know if they are separated or not.)

When those same common drainage systems have been overwhelmed in the past it lead to some untreated sewage getting dumped into the Clinton river and that resulted in Metro Beach on Lake St. Clair being closed.

Depending on which burb you are in, they might need to take some of those warnings more seriously.

I don't have to worry much myself. I am in western Wayne county and my condo is on a slab. But I was tempted to take a kayak to the I-75 and 696 interchange.......
Click to expand...

I'm near Berkley. There's no doubt that what entered our house was from the sanitary sewers. Very nasty stuff for sure. Certainly included some particles of human waste, mixed in with the mud.

Not sure how much is "quite a bit", though. Enough to be a health hazard? Certainly. Hence, the bleach. What I'm having a hard time accepting, though, is the idea that so much has to be thrown away. Sure some of the wood was warped by water, but if it came out looking structurally sound then wash it off, bleach it, and you're good to go....aren't you?

Yet I have read articles that say "When in doubt throw it out." implying that anything wet is a health hazard. I'm just not buying the idea that the stuff in my basement was so thoroughly contaminated that it can never be cleaned safely. I'm thinking that if I take a backpack, even the foam padding on the straps, and immerse it in bleach water for a while, and scrub the outside, and dry thoroughly, I ought to be safe.

One thing I notice is that there haven't been news stories about hospitals being inundated with patients who have flood related illnesses. I know that hundreds of thousands were flooded, and that not everyone followed all the hyper-cleanliness guidelines and/or threw out everything that hit the water. At least tens of thousand were exposed to the potential health hazard. If it were all that severe, hundreds of people would be in hospitals and maybe morgues by now.

It just seems a bit overhyped...........but I wish I knew for sure.
 
Probably a lawyer behind it. ie: you didn't follow our advice and throw everything out. If you get sick, not our fault.
From what you've said,, it sounds like you are doing the sensible thing. So bleach, hot water and soap and thoroughly scrub every thing.
 
Meadmaker said:
One thing I notice is that there haven't been news stories about hospitals being inundated with patients who have flood related illnesses. I know that hundreds of thousands were flooded, and that not everyone followed all the hyper-cleanliness guidelines and/or threw out everything that hit the water. At least tens of thousand were exposed to the potential health hazard. If it were all that severe, hundreds of people would be in hospitals and maybe morgues by now.

It just seems a bit overhyped...........but I wish I knew for sure.
Click to expand...

I really don't know for sure either. But I think they are more concerned about what happens when things that are not cleaned properly or cannot be cleaned enough come in contact with food or kids.

Relatives had a basement flooded so that everything below the third step was underwater. They are waiting on pick up and still adding more stuff. Lots of books and other things ruined.

I would think that anything metal should be okay. Fabric like back packs? Might be cleaned but also might get damaged by bleach. Or possible that the bleach does not quite reach everything. Some foam like materials might not get completely saturated depending on how they get immersed. Not sure how the bleach would alter the ability of the water to reach things. Does bleach count as a surfactant?

Wood might not give up all that it absorbs. Might get all the germs and could still end up with smells you don't want from either bleach or the water itself.
 
Meadmaker said:
For anything I felt like saving, I took a whole bunch of bleach to it. Camp furniture. Backpacks. Dishes. Bookcases (wood, not particle board. The particle board one were tossed. The piles of trash in our suburb were truly impressive.) Some people say that we are risking our lives by holding on to it.
Click to expand...

Anyone who has ever had a dog or child has known the joy that is an unexpected pile of feces that has long since crusted onto whatever it was originally placed upon. You don't tear out the carpet to get rid of it, you go, "Ew," then you clean it up and move on with your day. I realize that the scale of this is different, but there is nothing in the rawest of raw sewage that could contaminate smooth metal or glazed ceramic enough that a thorough cleaning and drying wouldn't fix it. Fabrics, if they can be cleaned, same thing. Poopy mud is gross, but it's not radioactive waste.

Bleach, heat, and forgetting that it soaked in the neighbor's used kielbasa should fix your problems.
 
Meadmaker said:
So, does anyone think I'm being way too non-chalant about the dangers of this contaminated stuff. Is there any source of reasonable and prudent dangers and precautions that isn't, "Throw it all away."

Or are the voices of alarm correct. Are we really an epidemic waiting to happen?
Click to expand...

I guess it depends how seriously you want to take Cholera
 
I feel like there are a number of these sort of public-health overreactions. It came up at the time of the Haiti earthquake: on one hand you had recovery teams saying "our first priority is to collect corpses so they don't cause disease", and occasionally an actual public-health professional would pop up on the news and say "um, it's not that urgent, corpses don't cause disease, you should focus on ... " and the folk-wisdom corpse-isolation program goes on as usual.

My guesswork-based hypothesis is that raw sewage would be a very very dangerous thing if someone in the system has cholera or dysentery or typhoid fever. Which is common in the developed world in the 1800s, and common in the developing world today, thus justifying the conventional wisdom that avoiding-sewage-prevents-disease. But the average American sewage system is serving how many zero cholera, dysentery, or typhoid fever patients? Zero, right? So while these diseases would spread through sewage if they were present ... well, they're basically not present. I think.

There's also the "toxic mold" thing, where somehow the message spread (which I still don't understand) that ordinary household mildew was some hyper-powered allergen which would give you every psychosomatic symptom in the book. Which apparently had a grain of truth behind it, except it turned out that it was some particular very rare mold. (Which also contributes to the "OMG clean the heck out of everything" thinking.)

My feeling is: I've done lots of DIY plumbing. Down the cleanout fitting goes the plumbing snake, up comes black-colored water and it's kinda gross. It gets on your hands, and your tools, and your clothes, and you wash up. I wash up extra-carefully afterwards and I choose one of the hotter laundry cycles. I'd say I wash up a little harder than I do when I've just handled a lot of raw chicken in the kitchen. Probably a lot harder than I wash up after changing the baby's diapers. But nowhere near the Tyvek-coveralls hazmat business that seems to be the norm for floods these days.

Just my impressions. I am open to expert correction on any of these points.
 
MG1962 said:
I guess it depends how seriously you want to take Cholera
Click to expand...

I would take it more seriously if there were a single reported case of it.

After googling, I did find references to doctors reporting a lot of allergy attacks. Makes sense. There was a lot of mold.

I know that there is health risk. No doubt. I just have to wonder how severe it all is, and to what extent you have to go to get rid of it. I know we threw out foam furniture and particle board if it got wet, so goodbye couches and most bookcases. Ordinary clothing, though, we washed. Camp furniture we doused thoroughly in regular water then scrubbed with bleach water.

Maybe I'll toss the backpacks. Those foam cushions are a bit worrisome. On the other hand, I've been handling all that stuff, even if just to throw it away, for two weeks, and the night of the flood I was wading in it well above my knees. I'm pretty thoroughly exposed.
 
MG1962 said:
I guess it depends how seriously you want to take Cholera
Click to expand...

If there's cholera in Michigan, which I doubt. Hepatitis A might be a different story.

Poo happens. I have an unusual perspective on this. I have a pretty strong immune system - maybe too strong - and I figure it's good to give it a workout now and then. In the OP it certainly sounds like many reasonable precautions are being followed.

ETA: If you actually make mead, who knows - this could be a coveted secret ingredient ;) - microbes can be our friends.
 
Last edited:
After stripping everything possible, I'd want to go over everything with a heated pressure washer with bleach solution, to the point of rinsing away the last suspicious particle. Then run a dehumidifier till fully dry. Hard goods like camping gear could also be steam cleaned, and I'd try running backpacks through the washer more than once.

After all of this but before beginning repairs to the space, I'd be looking at how to prevent the problem ever again. Seal off gravity drain and have two sump pumps (never neglect a backup on critical systems!) discharging into the sewer at a point higher than the flood level, or better yet to the surface away from the foundation. If there's a bathroom down there, a similar setup with a vault/sewage pump discharging into a line a few feet above ground level (in a manner that it cannot siphon back) will save the day.

My house sits between the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers; before they raised the levees my neighborhood was subject to 2-3' standing water in a 100 year flood; I incorporated a berm in my landscaping to the height of the toilets. Now the neighborhood is only considered vulnerable to 500-year floods, but I still feel fractionally safer with my berm.

ETA: The geiger counter reference was not in jest. I stopped buying "nitrohumus" fertilizer after reading about radionuclides from hospitals. Any industrial areas or hospitals with a nuclear medicine program upstream from you?
 
Last edited:
Minoosh said:
If there's cholera in Michigan, which I doubt. Hepatitis A might be a different story.

Poo happens. I have an unusual perspective on this. I have a pretty strong immune system - maybe too strong - and I figure it's good to give it a workout now and then. In the OP it certainly sounds like many reasonable precautions are being followed.

ETA: If you actually make mead, who knows - this could be a coveted secret ingredient ;) - microbes can be our friends.
Click to expand...

Usually, I do everything I can to keep bacteria out of mead. It's the primary cause of a completely ruined batch of home wine or beer.

There have been articles about the possibility of Hepatitis, but the last one I read said that public health officials were not recommending a vaccine. I did hear a recommendation to keep up to date on Tetanus shots, which I and most adults are not. I should do that....I guess.

I guess it comes down to level of risk. Yesterday, we took out some steaks to thaw and eat. We put them on the counter. Six hours later, we decided we weren't going to eat them. They were cool to the touch. I put them in the fridge, and we are eating them tonight. I like mine medium. My wife goes for rare.

There's no doubt about it. There will be a health risk from those steaks. We'll risk it. I wonder how that risk compares to anything we've done in the last couple of weeks.
 
Basically, you don't mess around with flood water. If you observe a manhole during a flooding rain, you may notice that it turns into a geyser. That's sewage water spewing up from underground, and it's just as unsanitary as it sounds. You can get infections in open wounds, and diarrheal diseases if you're exposed. If they've been sitting around for several days, flood waters can also carry toxic chemicals, whether from industrial sites or containers from people's homes.

I'm not saying you should throw everything out. I'm talking more about exposure to flood waters during the flood itself. Afterwards, it's really up to you what you want to save and what you want to throw out. Now, not to sound alarmist or anything, but there are infectious diseases that can stay embedded in household items even if you bleach them and set them in the sun for a week. If you're not willing to take any chances, and can afford to replace them, then throw them out.
 
I'd like to see some actual epidemiological research, though. Has someone tested municipal flood water and explained how infectious it is? Saying "bad bacteria are present" is not enough, there are bad bacteria everywhere. I recall seeing studies asking the question "how well do you have to clean a cutting board after cutting raw chicken?" The conclusion was that live salmonella bacteria were detectable on cutting boards (both wood and plastic ones IIRC) after any sane kitchen washing routine. But, the finding was that after a basic hot-soapy-sponge routine, the remaining bacteria were never seen to get off the cutting boards and onto new foods.

What I'd like to see is a similar study for floodwater. Sure, sewage would carry some nasty bacteria (probably not cholera!) into your books and drywall and fabrics. I have not seen any scientific evidence that the resulting bacteria can still cause problems after X level of washing.

(I would not be surprised in the slightest if the research justifies the conventional wisdom for drying-out-your-wall-cavities. Pull down that wet drywall, it's un-dryable, and get a fan onto the studs before it gets moldy. But, books? There are techniques for drying out flood-damaged books. Are books actually infectious after drying? For how long? Clothes? Are clothes actually infectious in some way after an aggressive trip through the washer? Padded clothes? I can put a pair of muddy sneakers through the wash and it sure seems to be the case that the foamy/padded components get soaked, soaped, rinsed, and dried adequately.

I understand the better-safe-than-sorry approach, but maybe more research (or, if the research exists, better-publicized research) would clarify the safe/sorry boundaries. Maybe a lot more stuff is safe than thought, and this research could save people lots of money/waste/heartache. Maybe stuff is more dangerous than thought and research could encourage better-directed cleaning/discarding of pathogenic items.
 
Frozenwolf150 said:
I don't know of any official studies that cover a broad array of floods, but there have been several specific tests of bacterial levels in specific floods.

Some news stories I found when searching for this:

http://news.sky.com/story/1204892/somerset-floodwater-has-high-bacteria-levels
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-26269714

So yeah, don't go swimming in it. Or bathing in it. Or drinking it.
Click to expand...

So, the flood water has high levels of bacteria. That's bad. (I was wading in the stuff for probably two hours. Maybe not a good idea.) Then, the waters receded, leaving everything wet. Now, though, those sixty to seventy times safe bacteria levels go on a cot whose canvas is soaked. It goes outside. It gets rained on. Eventually, it gets thoroughly soaked with a garden hose, more than once, and then sprayed very thoroughly with Lysol or bleach. (My wife uses Lysol instead of bleach because someone told her it works just as well.) The metal parts are wiped down with disinfectant wipes. Then it dries in the sun.

Still dangerous? I just have a hard time buying it. Sure, there might be some hazard, but there is hazard from eating that potato salad that has been sitting on the table at the 4th of July picnic. I know people who have gotten sick that way, but I still eat potato salad.

I'll be looking for stories about local hospitals receiving patients for flood borne illnesses. So far, I haven't seen anything except respiratory issues suffered by those with asthma or allergies.
 
Meadmaker said:
So, the flood water has high levels of bacteria. That's bad. (I was wading in the stuff for probably two hours. Maybe not a good idea.)
Click to expand...
Staph, or more particularly 'flesh eating bacteria' as it's called now ((evolution)) is the real danger, I think.
It all started five years ago this summer at Halawa Prison when the veteran guard had to walk through a prison unit flooded with raw sewage to turn off the sewer line. He said inmates had purposely clogged toilets in the special holding unit where he was temporarily assigned to sergeant duty that day so he went in through the sewage spill to shut off the sewer lines near several prison cells.

"I didn't know it but I had a small blister on my foot because I was wearing brand-new boots and turn around, I got the contamination into my system," Hamlow said.

He ended up with a triple staph infection in his left leg.

"It just progressed, even though I was taking care of it, soaking it and everything, it still got into my system and it also developed into MRSA, flesh-eating bacteria," Hamlow said.

Doctors had to amputate his left leg below the knee and later, in a second operation, they amputated more of his leg above his knee because the infection kept spreading.

He went back to work at Halawa prison for nearly a year, screening and sorting mail in the mail room.

But then the MRSA infection took hold in his right leg, which was also amputated.
Click to expand...
http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/...:+HawaiiNewsNow-News+(Hawaii+News+Now+-+News)
I think that's the real danger. But hey, my son had to swim across the Ala Wai Canal as part of a 'hazing' during his high school kayaking season.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom