Water damage restoration in Miami Gardens, FL

Restoration work in Miami Gardens, and the two things that shape it

The trade is the same everywhere. Water comes out, wet material that will not dry comes out with it, and what is left gets dried and cleaned according to what was in the water. What differs from city to city is the shape of the problem arriving at the door, and in Miami Gardens the shape is unusually well documented, because the city has published its own account of it.

Two things run through everything below. The water here is nearly always rain that could not drain, not sea water. And the properties that flood tend to flood again.

The ground is full before the rain starts

Miami Gardens describes its own position bluntly. The city "lies in a flat, low-lying area of Miami-Dade County", with flood hazards that come from "rainfall from tropical storms and other weather systems, hurricanes, and other heavy rain events", and it notes that there are "many canals, lakes, rivers and other bodies of water" inside the city limits.

Then it explains the mechanism, which is the part most residents have felt and not read. Groundwater here sits just below the ground surface. In the rainy season the canals and lakes are already full and the water table is already up against the surface, so when heavy rain arrives "the stormwater runoff has nowhere to drain, leading to occasional localized flooding".

Miami-Dade County says the same thing about the county as a whole, adding the scale of it: an average of 52 inches of rain falls in South Florida each year, and the county "lies close to sea level and its underground water supply is just below the ground surface".

A house sitting on a slab, in a place where the ground beneath the slab is already carrying as much water as it can hold, does not get a gentle version of a wet season. It gets water arriving at floor level with no downward escape route.

Two canals, and the drains that feed them

The city names its canals when it explains flooding, which is unusual and useful. It warns that in heavy rain "man-made canals such as the C-8 and C-9 Canals could overtop their banks or otherwise get backed up", causing "localized flooding in those areas next to the canals".

The sentence after that is the one worth keeping. Canal backup "can also cause secondary canals and neighborhood drainage systems to back up, making the flooding problems worse".

That is how a street half a mile from any visible water ends up under it. The neighborhood drain outside the house has nowhere to discharge, so it stops taking water, and then it starts giving some back. It is also why the first question after a flood here is not always where the water came from but which direction it was moving, because water backing up out of a storm drain is a different grade from rain running off a lawn.

The city also points to its own record of what this has done. It cites Hurricane Irene in 1999 and the No-Name Storm of October 2000 as events that "left many areas of the City with flooded conditions for long periods of time".

Twenty-eight properties, and twenty-six of them are somebody's home

FEMA publishes, by community, the properties that have made more than one flood claim. Miami Gardens has 28. Two of those are on the severe repetitive loss list.

The composition is what makes this list different from its neighbors'. Twenty-six of the 28 are primary residences. Twenty-seven of the 28 are in flood zone AE.

Compare that with Doral, nine miles southwest, which has 61 repeat-loss properties of which only 4 are primary residences and 46 sit in the shallow ponding zone. Doral's repeat losses are largely commercial and largely shallow. This city's are homes, in the deeper of the two mapped categories.

Miami-Dade County publishes what the letters mean. AE is the zone that "corresponds with flood depths greater than three feet". AH, the category Doral is full of, tops out at three.

Three feet of water in a single-story house is not a mopping job and it is not mostly a drying job either. At that depth the lower part of every wall lining, every run of cabinetry, every floor covering and much of the electrical installation below waist height is in the water. The restoration work becomes removal first and drying second, and the repair afterward is a larger contract than the restoration was.

Where the discount went

The National Flood Insurance Program runs a voluntary scheme, the Community Rating System, that rewards a city for doing more than the minimum on floodplain management. Miami-Dade County's own mitigation strategy sets out the effect: classes "range from 1 to 10 and they determine the premium discount for eligible flood insurance policies", with class 6 worth 20% inside a flood zone and class 7 worth 15%.

That county document, from July 2020, lists Miami Gardens at class 6. FEMA's current status book lists the city at class 7.

The city still tells residents, accurately, that "because the City of Miami Gardens participates in the National Flood Insurance Program and the Community Rating System, flood insurance for high risk and low risk areas is available for all residents at reasonable rates". Both statements are true. The discount is still there and it is five points smaller than it was.

For a household with a policy in force through that period, it is a rise of a few percent on a bill that was already one of the larger lines in the year, for no change to the house.

Three questions that make a quote comparable

Ask for three things and the quote becomes comparable to any other.

The first is a list, room by room, of what is being removed and what is being dried. The second is what grade the water is being treated as. Rain that ran in across a yard, water that came up out of a storm drain and water that backed up through a household drain are three different grades with three different methods, and the difference shows up in the price. The third is the boundary between restoration and repair, because drying a wall and rebuilding it are usually two contracts, and a single number that quietly contains both cannot be compared with a number that does not.

This site does not carry out the work and does not mark it up. What you write reaches a single restoration contractor operating in Miami Gardens, and they price it and call you without coming back through us. Before you sign anything, ask that contractor to show you their license and their insurance.

Which of the five jobs this is

Which page you need depends on the answer the city's own flood material keeps giving: where the water came from.

Rain that ran across a yard and in under a door, or a canal or neighborhood drain that overtopped into the street, is flood damage restoration, and the first hours of it are emergency water extraction because standing water keeps soaking for as long as it stands.

Water that came back up out of a household drain inside the building is a different grade with a different method, and that is sewage cleanup. Water that came down from an upper floor or a failed roof covering is ceiling water damage repair, where the drying sequence runs in the opposite direction.

Any of the four can end at mold remediation if material sat wet for much more than a day, and Florida licenses that as its own trade under its own statute. Everything is listed on the services hub.

Documentation is the part nobody can do for you

Everything above is work somebody else does. The one part that is entirely yours takes twenty minutes and decides how much of the rest gets paid for.

Photograph every affected room while the water is still at its highest, including the parts you do not think matter. Photograph the outside as well, so there is a record of where the water was in the street. Write down the time you first saw it. Keep every piece of paper anybody hands you, including disposal notes for material that is thrown away, because an adjuster valuing something that has already gone works from the list rather than from the item.

The city runs a floodplain management program that offers free flood assistance and inspections, and reporting street or drainage flooding to it also puts your event into the record the city works from.

The other pages on this site

For the trade rather than the place, start at water damage restoration in Hialeah or go straight to the services hub. The four neighboring municipalities each have their own flood record, and none of them looks like this one: service areas.