Homeowners, businesses clean up from heavy rains

If the recent storms damaged your home or vehicle, you need to take care of the damage before it takes a bigger bite out of your wallet. Many houses and businesses around El Paso tackled the leftover mess left Friday.

The rain can be more than just a hassle for drivers. If it hits heavily enough, it can wipe out your landscaping, which can be expensive to replace.
Landscapers could charge around $1.50 a square foot to replace loose rock in a front yard, costing hundreds of dollars to re-do one washed out by water. And if walls are damaged, that could cost hundreds more.

The hardest hit areas can even see damage done to parts of your home.

“Whenever it rains really hard,” central El Paso resident Rick Macias said. “Coming down Elm Street and down Wheeling cause it’s all down hill, there’s always rocks, big rocks and dirt and a flood of water that comes down here.”

The heavy rains that some parts of town saw over the past few days can really do some damage to your front yard. Even in some extreme cases, taking out the sidewalk in front of your house, like one home in central El Paso. That’s an unusual level of damage, but even if you’ve just seen some rocks washed out of your front yard, it’s the damage inside your home that could really cost you.

“Yeah, I’ve had a bunch of jobs where people were trying to take care of it themselves, residential and commercial,” Sal Fresquez, owner of Desert Steam Carpet Cleaning and Extraction. “I’ve had commercial properties where they didn’t know there was water damage in there. And two weeks later, it was a building they were going to lease, they walked in there, and up to about 5, 6 feet of mold from the bottom all the way up.”

Fresquez has been running ragged the past few days, removing water, carpets, even drywall and ceiling tiles that have been drenched in the recent rains. He said that homeowners and businesses that don’t take care of water damage the right way or soon enough could find themselves with mold before they know it.

“And then after that you’ve got consequences like asthma, and all these mold spores in the air,” Fresquez said. “It’ll become a really bad problem for them.”

Water removal services can run upwards of five thousand of dollar for an entire home, mold removal even more. Some of the best ways avoid the need for them? Make sure you’re home’s well maintained, and promptly deal with any and all water in the home.