Water damage restoration, Babylon, NY

Local conditions

What actually goes wrong in Babylon

Babylon Village sits on the Great South Bay, and almost everything a restoration crew sees here depends on which side of Montauk Highway the house is on. South of it the ground is a few feet above the tide, and when Sandy’s surge arrived on October 29, 2012 the flooding took, in the Town’s words, for the most part everything south of the highway. North of it the village rises toward Main Street and the station. The village is also older than its neighbors, with about a quarter of its houses built before 1940, and the part south of the highway is on the county sewer rather than a cesspool.

• Tidal and storm-surge flooding south of Montauk Highway
• Streets flooding at high tide as the bay pushes up the drain outfalls
• Sewer lateral and main backups on Sewer District No. 3
• Older village houses: plaster, old framing and additions of several eras

An older village than its neighbors

About one in four houses in Babylon Village was built before 1940, against about one in twenty in North Babylon and West Islip and about one in a hundred in Commack, according to the Census Bureau’s 2020–24 estimates. The railroad reached Babylon in 1867, the village was incorporated in 1893, and the hotel era that followed left a village center older than the post-war hamlets around it.

Old houses take water differently. Plaster on lath, old-growth framing and additions from different decades each dry at their own rate, and a house that has been added onto twice often sits on more than one foundation. We meter each part separately rather than drying the whole house to one number.

South of the highway, many houses have been lifted since Sandy; the mayor described homes going up three, four, five and even eight feet. The Town treats repairs costing more than half of a building’s value as substantial damage, which means rebuilding two feet above FEMA’s base flood elevation, and in the small wave-action zone on piles with breakaway walls.

The bay, the Carlls River and the canals

The Carlls River runs south through a chain of ponds, Belmont Lake, Southards Pond and Argyle Lake, to the Great South Bay. Argyle Lake, formed by a dam on the river, sits in the village just north of Montauk Highway. South of the highway the village is canals, marinas and bulkheads: Boynes Canal, Lewis Pond and the Main Dock among them.

The ground there is low. In Sandy a surge of six to seven feet on a normal high tide put two to five feet of water into the communities along the bay, and the National Weather Service recorded most of the South Shore below Montauk Highway, from Amityville to Islip, as completely inundated.

Sewer District 3, and drains that run backwards

Babylon Village south of Montauk Highway is in Suffolk County Sewer District No. 3, the Southwest district, whose Bergen Point plant in West Babylon has run since 1981. That is unusual for Suffolk: the county’s own plan says only the Atlantic-coast parts of Babylon, Islip and Brookhaven have sanitary sewers, and about three-quarters of the county still treats its own wastewater. A sewage backup here is a blocked lateral or a surcharged main, not a saturated cesspool, and the Town of Babylon sends problems with the line between the house and the street to the Southwest Sewer District.

The storm drains are a separate system, and on the bayfront they run backwards. The Town explains it plainly: when the tide rises above the outfall pipes in the canals and on the bayfront, it pushes water back up into the drainage system, and streets flood with no rain. After Sandy the state’s storm recovery office spent $1.4 million on flood devices in the village, including check valves at intersections on Bayview Avenue, Fire Island Avenue, Shore Drive and Montauk Highway.

Either way, water that came up from the street or the bay is category three, and sewage cleanup follows the same rule: what it touched is removed or decontaminated, not just dried.

Flood damage on record in Babylon

1. October 29, 2012 (Hurricane Sandy)

   A surge of six to seven feet put two to five feet of water into the bayside communities, with major residential damage recorded in Babylon, Amityville and Lindenhurst. On Trask Lane a house burned with the water three-quarters of the way up the door, and a year later about fifty village families were still not home.

2. August 28, 2011 (Irene)

   Houses and streets along the canals and the dock went under a couple of feet of water, per the National Weather Service.

3. March 14, 2017

   A coastal storm put water over every bulkhead on a tidal pond and six inches into the street near Belton Court, half a mile south of Montauk Highway.

4. November 2022

   The state finished its flood-resiliency work in the village and the Carlls River watershed: check valves, new drainage and culverts, sluice gates and bulkheads inside the storm drains.

Mold · by appointment

Mold removal in Babylon

Mold after a bay flood is usually a question of what was dried instead of removed. Category three water does not leave clean materials behind, and in the older village houses it gets into old sheathing and the cavities between additions, where it tends to announce itself as a smell a season later rather than as anything you can see.

Plaster itself is a poor food source for mold; the wood lath and framing behind it are not. Growth behind plaster is common and invisible from the room, which is why a moisture reading and a small inspection opening are worth more here than a surface wipe.

Mold remediation is booked, not dispatched

Mold remediation is scheduled work. Nobody needs a crew at two in the morning for mold growth that took weeks to appear, and a contractor who sells it as an emergency is selling the fear rather than the fix. The job starts with a survey: where the hidden moisture is coming from, how far the growth goes behind the finish, and whether the area is large enough to fall under New York’s mold rules. Mold prevention after a water loss is mostly moisture control: dry the structure to its standard, then keep indoor humidity between 40 and 60 percent.

Once a project covers more than about ten square feet, Article 32 of the New York Labor Law separates the person who assesses the mold from the company that removes it, and the same firm may not do both on one job. That is why the clearance test at the end goes to an independent assessor, not to us. How mold inspection works on Long Island sets out the whole rule.