When we arrived home Wednesday night, the house was filled with chest-deep pitch black water, the dogs were swimming to stay afloat and our major appliances had taken on so much water, they’d fallen over completely. I swam out around the backyard to shut off the main power line then my wife, dogs and I got on top of a mattress that was still above water and waited there until the morning when we could see what was going on and the water had gone down some. There’s a small one room guesthouse in the backyard that is elevated, so while it had also taken on water it had receded by morning so we have a dry and safe place to shelter while we figure everything out. Once we were able to charge our phones and start making calls, we were put in contact with the claims adjuster for our homeowners policy who will be here in a few days to assess the damage. He said they won’t be able to cover much because it is due to flooding and that’s a separate policy which I did not realize we didn’t have. FEMA and SBA are not available since it has not been declared a federal emergency. The house is not liveable and basically needs to be rebuilt from scratch. We just signed our 30 year mortgage less than a year ago. I have no idea what to do next, do we declare bankruptcy? It will cost what we still owe on the house to fix it but we can barely afford the mortgage already, we can’t take on another loan definitely nowhere close to the $450,000 it would take. We’ve been googling private relief organizations all day and calling all the contacts we know but I am at a total dead end. Thank you in advance for any advice!
Submitted April 14, 2023 at 05:38PM by mxobn https://ift.tt/EPD6Ns5
