Water damage restoration, Hicksville, NY

Local conditions

What actually goes wrong in Hicksville

Hicksville is inland Nassau: about 150 feet above sea level, no shoreline, and storm water that drains into fenced recharge basins rather than to a creek or the bay. So the water that damages houses here almost always comes from inside them, from a supply line, a water heater, a washing-machine hose or a sewer lateral. More than half the houses were built in the 1950s and nearly all of them are detached, and on the Levittown side a share of them sit on the original Levitt slab, with the heating pipes inside the floor.

• Slab leaks in original Levitt radiant tubing that drain into the ground unseen
• Supply-line, water-heater and washing-machine failures inside the house
• Sewer lateral and main backups on the county system
• Cloudburst water getting in at grade when the storm drains fall behind

Levitt slabs and 1950s houses

The Levitt development that built Levittown did not stop at its postal zone. Levittown’s own history counts part of Hicksville’s 11801 inside it, and locals call it the Levittown section of Hicksville. The Census Bureau’s 2020–24 estimates put 15 percent of Hicksville’s homes in the 1940s and 58 percent in the 1950s; next door in Plainview the 1940s figure is 2 percent.

Levitt’s houses were built on concrete slabs, which took a change to the building code, and heated by hot water running through copper tubing cast into the slab, with no insulation or vapor barrier beneath it. When the copper began to fail, the leaks drained down into the ground instead of coming up through the floor, so small ones went unnoticed until they were not small, and by 1965 owners were being advised to disconnect the floor coils and fit baseboard convectors. Some Hicksville Levitts were converted decades ago and some were not, and it is the first thing we ask.

A slab leak is a different job from a basement flood. There is usually no standing water to pump out: the moisture is in the slab and under the flooring, and the drying plan is built around readings taken through the floor covering rather than around extraction.

No shoreline, and a water table far below

Hicksville has no shoreline, and its storm drains run to recharge basins. The U.S. Geological Survey counted about 80 of them in the Bethpage–Hicksville–Levittown area, where runoff soaks back down to the aquifer the water district pumps from. The Town of Oyster Bay calls them sumps; its drainage division looks after the Town-owned ones, and each has its number on a sign at the gate, which is the number to give when you report one backing up.

The water table sits dozens of feet below the basement floor, so the groundwater seepage behind so many Smithtown claims is not a Hicksville problem. When a Hicksville basement or slab takes water, it came from a pipe, an appliance, the sewer or rain getting in at the surface, and each of those is a different claim.

On the county sewer since 1980

Hicksville has been on Nassau County’s sanitary sewer since about 1980, according to the U.S. Geological Survey; before that, every house had a cesspool or septic tank. About 85 percent of Nassau is sewered against 26 percent of Suffolk, so a Hicksville backup is a different animal from one in Smithtown.

Here a sewage backup is a blocked lateral, the pipe from the house to the street, or a main surcharged in a heavy storm, not a saturated leaching field. Both put category three water on the floor. Stop using the fixtures, stay out of the water, and do not let anyone tell you a wet-vac and bleach is the cleanup: porous materials the water reached come out, and what stays is cleaned and decontaminated before it is dried.

Flood damage on record in Hicksville

1. August 18–19, 2024

   The storm that put eight to ten inches on Suffolk’s North Shore dropped 2.61 inches on Hicksville, according to the National Weather Service, about a third of what fell on Smithtown.

2. September 1–2, 2021 (Ida)

   About 3.8 inches fell on Hicksville, per the National Weather Service totals, and the flash-flood damage across Nassau brought FEMA household assistance to the county.

3. October 29, 2012 (Sandy)

   The surge that flooded Nassau’s South Shore below Merrick Road never came near a hamlet 150 feet above sea level. In Hicksville, Sandy was a wind storm, not a flood.

Mold · by appointment

Mold removal in Hicksville

On a Levitt slab, mold tends to follow a leak nobody could see: carpet or flooring laid over a damp slab, with growth on the underside and along the tack strip long before anything shows on top. A smell of mildew in a house with no basement is worth taking seriously for exactly that reason.

In the rest of Hicksville’s 1950s houses the pattern is the ordinary inland one. A supply line or a water heater let go, it was dried with fans rather than dehumidifiers, and the colony behind the drywall shows up six weeks later.

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.