Water damage restoration, Commack, NY

Local conditions

What actually goes wrong in Commack

Commack is one hamlet in two towns. Roughly two-thirds of it is in the Town of Smithtown and a third in the Town of Huntington, its homes use several mailing ZIP codes, and its school district does not follow its borders. It is also inland in a way Smithtown is not: no shoreline, no mapped stream, no FEMA high-risk flood zone, and a water table dozens of feet down in sand and gravel. The houses went up fast, seven in ten of them between 1950 and 1969, and apart from two small county sewer districts, Commack is on cesspools and septic.

• Rain getting into basements in cloudbursts, as on August 18–19, 2024
• Cesspool and septic backup when the system cannot take any more
• Supply-line, water-heater and appliance failures in 1950s and 1960s houses
• Permits and inspections from two different towns, depending on the street

A hamlet built in twenty years

Commack was farmland into the 1950s. The Northern State Parkway reached it in 1952 and the Sunken Meadow Parkway in 1954, and the building that followed was fast: 72 percent of Commack’s homes were built between 1950 and 1969, 44 percent in the 1960s alone, according to the Census Bureau’s 2020–24 estimates. Ninety-three percent are single-family detached houses and nearly as many are owner-occupied.

Houses of that age fail in predictable places: supply lines and fittings that have been in the walls for sixty years, a frozen water line on an outside wall in a cold snap, water heaters on their third or fourth replacement, and basements finished long after the house was built. FEMA’s flood-insurance record for the 11725 ZIP code is small, but of the claims that note a foundation, 19 of 20 had a basement and 17 of those were finished.

Inland, on sand and gravel

Commack has no shoreline and no mapped stream, and FEMA puts none of it in a high-risk flood zone. It sits on outwash sand and gravel, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s wells inside the hamlet put the water table roughly 40 to 100 feet below the surface, shallowest in the northeast.

That makes Commack the opposite of Smithtown’s Northeast Branch, where the water table comes up into basements. When a Commack basement floods, the water came from above, through a window well, a door or a crack after a cloudburst, or from inside the house, from a pipe, a water heater or the cesspool. Each of those is a different claim, and the first job is working out which one it was.

Cesspools on both sides of the line

Apart from two small county sewer districts, one covering industrial and office parcels and one a cluster of townhouses, Commack is on cesspools and septic, whichever town the house is in. Suffolk County’s hazard plan explains why: in Suffolk only the Atlantic-coast parts of Babylon, Islip and Brookhaven have sanitary sewers.

A cesspool backs up when it can no longer take what the house sends it, whether it is full, clogged or overwhelmed by storm water, and the backup comes through the lowest drain in the house. That is category three water. Stop running water, keep people and pets out of the basement, and have a cesspool contractor pump the system; the sewage cleanup, decontamination and drying are our part.

Flood damage on record in Commack

1. August 18–19, 2024

   The National Weather Service recorded water rescues of stranded motorists on Fisher Road late on the 18th and, overnight, multiple homes with basement flooding in Commack, Smithtown and St. James. One Commack weather station logged 8.82 inches. FEMA’s three flood-insurance claims from the 11725 ZIP that week were all rainfall, in a low-risk zone.

2. 1979

   The busiest year in Commack’s flood-insurance record: 10 of the ZIP code’s 38 claims since 1978 came in 1979, a year of unusually heavy precipitation on Long Island according to Suffolk’s hazard plan.

Mold · by appointment

Mold removal in Commack

Commack mold usually follows a one-time event that was never properly dried: a basement that took rain in a cloudburst, a water heater that let go, a backup that was mopped rather than cleaned. The water table is too deep to keep a basement damp the way it can in parts of Smithtown, so persistent growth here points to a specific source, and that source is worth finding before anyone removes anything.

Finished basements are the usual place. If one smells musty on a humid day, have it metered before anyone opens a wall, because the reading tells you how much has to come out.

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.