Data Error Hot Springs, NCLocal Weather Alerts
There was an error retrieving the National Weather Service alert data.

Hot Springs Ready: Protect Your Home From Flood Damage Before the Next High Water

By /

The part of a flood you actually control

There is a lot about a flood that a household has no say in. How much rain falls upstream, how fast Spring Creek comes up, what the river decides to do to a bank it has been working on for a few thousand years, and how long and how well the recovery goes afterward. Plenty of households here learned more about that last one after Helene than they ever wanted to know. What follows is about the other part, the part where the work you do to protect your home from flood damage happens on your own schedule, on your own property, and nobody else gets a vote on whether it counts.

A water heater sitting on a two foot platform is a water heater that survives eighteen inches of water. That stays true no matter what anyone tells you later.

Most of what follows is not expensive. Some of it is one Saturday. All of it is worth more done in a dry month than promised in a wet one.

Protect your home from flood damage by raising what water ruins first

FEMA’s Homeowner’s Guide to Retrofitting, publication P-312, lays out six ways to protect a house from flooding, from raising the whole structure down to simple barriers. For most homes here, the best return on the smallest money is the service equipment.

Think about what sits low in an ordinary house in this valley. The water heater. The furnace or air handler. The electrical panel. The washer and dryer. The outdoor unit for the heat pump. Ductwork running under the floor. Every one of those is expensive, every one is ruined by a few inches of dirty water, and every one can be moved or raised.

FEMA’s standard is to get service equipment at least one foot above the base flood elevation for the property, and another foot or two above that when it can be done without much added cost. In practice:

  • A water heater set on a built up platform instead of on the slab or the crawlspace floor. Electric units can sometimes move to a higher floor entirely with a drain pan under them. Gas units are harder to relocate because of venting, so raising them where they stand is usually the practical answer.
  • A furnace or air handler moved up, and a heat pump’s outdoor unit set on a platform cantilevered off the wall rather than on posts, because posts catch debris.
  • An electrical panel relocated above the lowest floor. This is licensed electrician work and it is the priciest item on the list. It is also the one that decides whether a house has power in the days after.
  • A washer and dryer on a permanent raised platform. Cheap fix, two appliances saved.
  • Ductwork under the floor, which FEMA says should be replaced outright once it has been under water. Knowing that in advance changes what you argue about later.

You do not have to do all of it. Pick the one item this year’s budget covers and do that one.

Anchor the propane tank

This one is specific to how we live out here, and it is a rule rather than a suggestion.

The North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which regulates LP gas in this state, points to NFPA 58, section 6.8.1.6: where necessary to prevent flotation due to possible high flood waters, containers shall be securely anchored. Tanks below the 100 year flood level have to be anchored, and the department puts the responsibility plainly on the tank owner. If you place tanks, it says, it is your responsibility to know where that level is.

The method that holds is helix anchors, the same style used for mobile homes, sized to the soil at your site, with cable or strap rated for the load. The point is not only keeping the tank on your property. It is keeping it from flipping, which is what tears a gas line loose.

Two more things from the same state guidance. Learn how to shut off your propane supply and do it once on a calm day, so you are not figuring it out by flashlight. And after any flooding, do not turn the gas back on yourself. State law requires the propane company to check the system for leaks first.

The crawlspace, and why sealing it is the wrong instinct

Here is a step beyond the basics, and it runs against what nearly everyone’s gut says.

If your house sits on a crawlspace or any walled enclosure below the living floor, the instinct is to seal it up tight and keep the water out. That is the opposite of what the engineering calls for. Water that cannot get in also cannot equalize, and the difference between eighteen inches of water outside and dry air inside is exactly what pushes a foundation wall over. Once the wall goes, you no longer have a flooded crawlspace. You have a structural problem.

The answer is flood openings, and FEMA’s technical bulletin on them is specific. For standard openings, you need one square inch of net open area for every square foot of enclosed area. You need at least two of them, placed on different sides of the enclosure so that debris blocking one does not defeat the whole thing. And the bottom of each opening has to sit no higher than one foot above the outside grade, so water starts moving through as soon as it arrives instead of after it has built up pressure.

Run the number for your own house. A 900 square foot crawlspace needs 900 square inches of net open area, which is a real quantity of vents, not one or two. It is also the kind of number a contractor gets right when you ask and gets wrong when you don’t.

What sandbags can and cannot do

Sandbags come up every time heavy rain is in the forecast, so it is worth being straight about them.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says in its own flood fighting guidance that sandbag construction does not guarantee a water tight seal. Sandbags divert moving water around a building instead of through it. They buy time and they steer water. They do not make a house waterproof.

The quantities surprise people too. The Corps’ figures come to roughly 800 bags for one foot of height across 100 linear feet, and about 4,500 bags for three feet across that same distance. Bags get filled only one third to one half full, 30 to 50 pounds each, laid lengthwise parallel to the flow, each course offset by half a bag from the one below and stamped down. Anything over three courses high has to be built as a pyramid or it will fall over.

The honest reading: sandbags are a real tool for a few inches of nuisance water and for steering runoff away from a door. They are not a plan for a river coming up.

Ask about permits before you start, not after

Two things worth knowing before you hire anybody.

The town’s zoning compliance form comes first. The Town of Hot Springs charges $20 for a zoning compliance application, and the town’s planning page says plainly that you need it in hand to get your county building permit. Confirm the current process at Town Hall before you schedule work.

Then there is the floodplain. Because Hot Springs participates in the National Flood Insurance Program, federal rules require the town to permit development in the floodplain, and development is defined broadly enough to take in filling, grading and excavation, not only buildings. Regrading a yard counts.

One threshold is worth understanding before you plan anything large. As the UNC School of Government’s floodplain guidance explains, once the cost of repair or improvement reaches 50 percent of a structure’s market value, the structure is treated as substantially improved or substantially damaged, and the whole thing has to be brought into compliance with current floodplain standards. A big remodel can cross that line without anyone intending it. Our post on rebuilding after a flood covers how that rule works on the damage side.

When there is no time for any of this

Sometimes the water is coming and all you have is your hands and about two hours.

That is the case to prepare for on paper. Walk the house once on a calm day and write down what goes up and where it goes, room by room, in order. The photographs. The hard drive. The tools in the shop that are your living. The papers that prove what you own. Tape the list inside a closet door and tell everyone in the house where it is.

The reason to write it down is not that you would forget what matters to you. It is that two hours of adrenaline is a terrible time to make thirty decisions in a row, and people who had time to save things have lost them anyway because nobody decided in advance what went first. A written list turns a panic into an errand.

Pick one item off this post and do it while the weather is boring. The water heater platform is the usual place to start, and it is the one most people can manage in an afternoon. Next up: the roads out of town, which ones are real, and which one only looks like a way out.

Resources mentioned in this post

Scroll to Top