Danger of Flood Water?

[Meadmaker]

He doesn't put his clothes in a bucket of sewage, let them soak for a few days and then try to wash them. There's the difference between getting some on your jeans and having your jeans soak in flood water for an extended period. You can wash and disinfect them. You might get all the smell out, but in the end you'll have expended a lot of time and effort to get something that's still not as good a new.

There's a huge difference between "not as good as new" and "dangerous".

I heard a FEMA official on the radio saying that it didn't matter if it was your wedding album. It came into contact with the floodwater, so it had to be thrown away.

He should be ashamed of himself for spreading that kind of fear and scaring people into doing things that were not necessary, and created both emotional and financial hardship.

I feel fortunate that I was skeptical, and so limited my own unnecessary cost and waste somewhat. However, my wife is less skeptical, and downright wooish at times, so we threw away some things that I was pretty sure were safe to keep, and will cost at least a thousand dollars to replace, because she had been told that it was unsafe, and I couldn't prove otherwise.


A big red flag for me in the early coverage was that the interviewed experts were counseling to throw things away, unless you didn't have insurance, in which case bring out the bleach. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the presence of insurance does not make things more hazardous. It seemed clear to me that they were really saying, "Why take a chance? Someone else is paying for it."

At this point, I'm fairly confident that I did some things during and immediately after the flood that exposed me to some danger, but at this point, I am completely safe, even though I saved paper, photographs, tents, and foam hockey pads that were inundated.