If water got into your house, the first thing to understand is that the water itself may be live.
Floodwater is not clean water. It comes in carrying silt, sewage and whatever the bayou picked up on the way, and all of that makes it conduct electricity better than the water in your kitchen sink does. If it reaches an outlet or a junction box that is still energized, the water around it carries current. There is no hum, no steam, no bubbling at the surface. It sits there looking like water.
Do not go in
If there is any chance the power is still on, stay out of the house, the crawlspace, and the shop. Do not stand in water and touch a panel, and do not flip a breaker to see what happens.
If water is still rising toward the panel, call Entergy or DEMCO and let them cut it at the pole or pull the meter out of its socket. That is their equipment, it is their job, and it is the one call worth making before anything else.
The cable in your walls does not dry out
Most people assume the yellow cable inside their walls is waterproof because it has a plastic jacket on it. It is not. The jacket protects the wire from the studs and the sheetrock. It does not protect it from water, and the code says so plainly, because NM-B is listed for dry locations only.
The inside is the problem. The paper wrapping around the conductors acts like a wick. Once water reaches a device box it travels up inside the jacket and stays there. You can cut the sheetrock out, run dehumidifiers for a week, and the silt and the damp are still sitting inside the cable.
That is why we will not clear a house because it looks dry. The failure shows up later, as a hot spot behind a wall, an outlet that will not hold a plug tight any more, or a breaker that has stopped tripping when it should.
What gets replaced
The guidance the trade works from is published by NEMA, and it sorts water-damaged equipment into what can be reconditioned and what cannot. Molded-case circuit breakers are in the replace column. So are fuses. Anything with a circuit board inside it is a replace too, and that includes every GFCI in the house.
In practice that means:
- Circuit breakers come out. A flooded breaker can reset and click like it is fine, and then fail to trip when it matters, which is the failure that starts fires.
- Outlets, switches and GFCIs come out. Silt coats the brass contacts and takes the spring out of them. A plug that no longer fits tight is a plug that heats up.
- Submerged cable gets cut back above the highest waterline, and a run that cannot reach a dry junction box gets pulled back to the panel and replaced.
Common questions
Can a flooded breaker be cleaned and tested instead of replaced? No. NEMA puts molded-case breakers in the replace column rather than the recondition column, and the reason is the mechanism inside. Silt gets into the trip linkage. The handle still moves and the breaker still resets, so it passes a look and fails a fault.
What has to happen before the power comes back on? It depends how high the water got. If it went over the meter, Entergy pulls the meter, and in a city that requires electrical permits you need an electrician to inspect the system and a permit issued before they will reconnect. If the water stayed below the meter but reached the outlets inside, Entergy will still energize the line, and they recommend an inspection before you close the main. Do not read that as permission to skip it. A lot of homes in Denham Springs came through the 2016 flood that way, dried out, and got rewired two years later anyway.
The GFCI dried out, so why is it dead? Because a GFCI has a small circuit board in it, and water ruins the board even after the plastic is dry. Most of them trip their own end-of-life lock and never reset again. That is the device doing its job. Leave it.
Do not gamble with a system that has been underwater. Call us and we will go through it properly, find what the water actually reached, and put the house back to something you can sleep in.