Flood Recovery

[A.David.MacKinnon]

We got hit with a flash flood in Toronto last week. After a fairly long, hot, dry spell we got about a months worth of rain in two hours. My house is in an old river valley. The storm sewer system in the older parts of Toronto are about 100 years old and designed to overflow into the regular sewer system when they are pushed beyond capacity. When the regular sewer system hits capacity it backs up into your house. You can probably see where I'm going with this.
I woke up last Wednesday morning to discover that I'd had about 8" of water in the basement. That also happens to be the location of my mix/writing room.
Luckily most of the studio gear was above the water line. I lost a couple of minor rack piece (mostly power supplies), had a bunch of damaged guitars and a water logged kick drum. My snakes and mic patch panels all got hit too.
Now that I've got the basement torn apart and dried out I'm starting to pick my way through the effected gear and salvaging what I can. The first step is hosting off snakes and patch panels. Then I guess I have to give all those contacts a massive dose of contact cleaner. After that everything goes to storage for a while.
The kicker in all of this is that I was about a month away from moving the whole studio into a detached garage. Great timing.

Has any one else had similar disasters? What did you do? After huricane sandy I remember seeing an article about salvaging wet gear. I'll be damned if I can find it now though.
Any advice would be much appreciated.

[markjazzbassist]

no advice, but sending some positive vibes in hopes you're able to get it salvaged and back up and running. i've appreciated your posts and insights on here, i've also enjoyed your recordings you've posted. keep your head up, and i'm looking forward to the thread on that new garage studio

[Nick Sevilla]

Man that sucks.

Go get cans and cans of WD40. Put it on anything that can rust for now.

After a while, go through and clean the WD 40 off. This will force the water off the metal.

(don't put in potentiometers etc).

CAIG also has some good stuff for cleaning / restoring potentiometers, if you need to (the guitars for example). Disassemble all equipment
that ended up in the water, no matter what it is.

To get rid of mold, you can use some mild soap, or white vinegar diluted in water, sprayed on, then wiped off.

For rackmount gear, open it up asap, use compressed air ( a compressor is great for this), and get all the water you can
out of the insides.

Let the rackmount gear dry out for about 3-4 days before plugging it in. As long as you get all the water out and do not let it stay in
there, mold should not grow inside the equipment.

Good luck!!!

[vvv]

Electronics is tough.

Best results I've had is if possible put in the sun to dry, and rotate the item every hour or so.

Next alternative is in front of a fan for a couple days, rotating the item.

Partial disassembly helps - get the cases open, etc.

Then hit it with contact cleaner, WD40, whatever you think best.

You might be able to save the power supplies if you bury them in rice - I ran a cell phone thru a washer and rice brought it back, Well, except for the touch function on the touch screen ...

[floid]

Oh man, sorry to hear that.
Assuming the electronics don't have something like an old transformer full of paper between the windings, soaking and washing with generous amounts of rubbing alcohol and distilled water and then allowing to thoroughly dry might help.
If the bass drum had a wrap, you probably want to remove it so it can dry from both sides.

[shedshrine]

Damn.
Found this

[drumsound]

I'm really sorry to hear about this, Dave.

I agree with people who suggest opening everything up and getting some air flow happening. Take the bass drum totally apart, get the lugs, legs and any mounting hardware off and let the wood dry.

GOOD LICK!!!

[MoreSpaceEcho]

Has any one else had similar disasters?

none of my gear got ruined but yeah. very recently. i've had massive problems with water. it's the worst. i'll wait to tell the story cause

A) this is your thread, and
II) i wanna have the hollywood ending picture to finish the story with, and i'm not quite there yet.

i don't have any advice as far as wet gear, but my sincere condolences man, it's a horrible, horrible feeling to walk into your studio and have any amount of water in there. i wouldn't wish it on anyone.

friends of mine in chicago had this exact same thing happen at their house, there was at least a foot of water in their basement. they had to get a crew in to cut out the bottom 16" of drywall all around the room, to keep it from rotting/molding, and do whatever else they do. they left a half dozen giant industrial fans down there for a week to dry everything out.

again, really sorry to hear this. you'll get through it. feel free to PM if you just wanna vent your frustrations, i'm a sympathetic ear.

[A.David.MacKinnon]

Thanks everybody. The outpouring of support is really encouraging. In all honesty I got off fairly lightly. 99% of my rack gear was above the water line and the pieces that weren’t were all minor (a pair of urei graphic EQs, some patch panels, rack mount power bars and other minor pieces). I lost a couple of guitars but they were odball/inexpensive ones and in one case ( a mahogany harmony 165 acoustic) I was able to find a better version on Craigslist for a bargain price.
In all honesty I got off pretty easy and I have flood insurance. It won’t cover everything but it’ll get us most of the way there.

One of my biggest hits was the studio computer. The bottom 6” got soaked. I’m hoping I can find a replacement and just swap the cards and drives from the old one. That’s a job for next week.

Anyway, it could have been worse. While I was cutting the drywall out to knee level and pulling wet insulation out of the walls I was listening to a story on CBC radio about two guys trapped in an elevator that was filling with water. By the time the cops rescued them there was about 3” of air left in the car and they were standing on the hand rails to reach it.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ ... -1.4777629

Global warming/climate change etc, etc, etc. This was our second storm of the century in 5 years and another one 75% as strong just rolled through this afternoon. The studio is currently piled in a self storage locker and will be in a dry, ground level, converted garage by the end of September. Onward and upwards.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

that sucks about your computer but yeah it could've been much worse. of course, IME the psychic damage from flooding is worse than the structural/financial damage, and there's no insurance for that.

anyway hopefully your new space is on high ground and you will never have to worry about this again!

anyone wants to see a water horrorshow, google 'ellicott city flooding 2018'.

[Scodiddly]

That's a huge bummer no matter how your gear ends up.

Anyway, the best approach is clean water to get out mud, then ispropyl alcohol to get the water out. All that as soon as possible, followed by a dry location and a fan. You don't want to really heat things up very much, that can cause other problems, but a little warmth will lower the local humidity and help the air carry away moisture.

Some day I'm going to find the guy who said to put wet phones in a bag of rice and give him a solid punch to the nose. Open air with a fan is way more effective.

[emrr]

Really sorry to hear about this. I found the article!

http://www.trustmeimascientist.com/2012 ... udio-gear/

[standup]

I had a similar thing happen. 3-4" of water in the basement. During a heavy rain, the breaker for the sump pump flipped off for unknown reasons. There my have been some "vintage" ancient audio gear running off that circuit too. Anyway, with no sump pump the basement filled to the level the groundwater outside.

I walked down the stairs and saw the light of a power strip glowing dimly from underwater. Couldn't walk over to the breaker box. So we rigged up a pump and started expelling water.

The losses were mostly wall wart power supplies and power strips. And snakes, but there's one I needed a different configuration anyway. In the future the power will all be off the floor.

This was in February. When a contractor came to discuss ripping out wet drywall and putting in a dedicated electrical line for the pump, and new grounded/isolated wiring for other electrical (16" off the floor), he noticed our basement wall was weirdly bulging -- our foundation is slowly collapsing. So now, in August, we're waiting for a contractor to show up to reinforce the wall. They're three weeks late and not answering calls.

Fun times. But by October I should have everything operational again. I hope. I do this in my spare time, not trying to make a living.

[A.David.MacKinnon]

Really sorry to hear about this. I found the article!

http://www.trustmeimascientist.com/2012 ... udio-gear/

That's the one I was looking for! Thanks

[A.David.MacKinnon]

Standup - that sounds horrible and somewhat familiar (minus the foundation issues). Hope you get yourself sorted and up and running again soon. Even as a spare time thing it’s a drag to not be able to do what you want.
I’m full time and I have to say that the biggest blessing in all of this is that it happened in the middle of my summer vacation. I delivered finals on two giant, months long projects the day before my vacation started. That felt great. Spending half the vacation doing flood repair feels less than great but at least I’m not trying to finish projects in the midst of all this.
On the upside, the new garage studio is framed, electricity is in and today we took down the door and starts framing in the window that will replace it. I hope to be moving the gear out of self storage and into its new home by mid September. Fingers crossed