How Water Damage Restoration Works

In most communities, water damage restoration isn't considered a very pressing concern, given that most communities simply aren't prone to flooding in a capacity that makes it terribly necessary. Only after Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans did water damage restoration become a concern for people, or at least an issue worth recognition, even to people outside New Orleans who reasonably considered the flooding of an entire city to be a bad thing. At that time mold was also familiar but because of the circumstances, mold removal didn't come to mind. What few Americans realize is that the flooding of New Orleans was a relatively small catastrophe compared to flood scenarios experienced in other parts of the world.

While Hurricane Katrina was no doubt a national disaster of epic proportions, whose flooding claiming at least 1,836 lives, it pales comparison to an event like the 1938 Yellow River flood in China, where the death toll is estimated to have been as high as a million people, with several million more turned refugees and forced to flee their homes and the areas affected by the flooding. The geographical effects of this flood alone lasted for nearly 10 years, the entire course of the Yellow river itself having been diverted and necessitated efforts of water damage restoration far beyond those demanded by New Orleans.

Unlike the flooding after Hurricane Katrina, the 1938 flood was a man-made disaster. In 1938, China was already in its second year of war against the invading armies of Imperial Japan during the second Sino-Japanese war, and by that point Japan had seized control of nearly the entire northern portion of the country. In order to stop the Japanese advance and to stall their seizure of the major Chinese cities Wuhan and Xi'an, the Chinese made the drastic decision to open dikes along the Yellow River, flooding the river valley and annihilating infrastructure vital to the Japanese advance.

In order to catch the Japanese by surprise, the Chinese made no effort to notify Chinese civilians living in areas that would be affected by the flooding, and consequently, hundreds of thousands were drowned in their sleep. More deadly than the actual flooding was the threat of waterborne diseases, such as Botulism, Cholera, Dysentery, Malaria, and Typhus, which likely claimed hundreds of thousands more lives than the waters themselves. The floods having submerged nearly 21,000 square miles of land destroyed local crops resulting in famine and starvation among the local population not yet affected by the other consequences of the flood.

In 1946 and 1947, after the end of the Second World War, the dikes were rebuilt in one of China's largest efforts in water damage restoration, eventually restoring the Yellow River to its pre-1938 course. To this day, the Chinese government still conceals most of the details regarding the disaster from the public.


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Article by Paul Wise. When it comes to water damage restoration, Paul recommends Cleanflood.com for more tips and details on mold removal and such.