Think of cleaning your home after a flood as a marathon, North Dakota State University Extension Service agricultural engineer and flood expert Ken Hellevang advises.

Flood recovery is a long process, and it can have a huge impact on many parts of your life, including your health, emotions and finances.

“Because cleaning a flooded home is such an enormous undertaking, don’t make hasty decisions,” Hellevang says. “This likely is a new experience for you, and you need to do the cleanup correctly. Be willing to seek help, not only for the actual cleanup, but also for issues such as dealing with stress and putting your financial life back together.”

He has developed five short videos on which he narrates PowerPoint presentations that provide tips for protecting yourself from hazards, assessing your home’s structural integrity, cleaning flood-contaminated materials and drying the structure. The videos are available on NDSU’s flood website at http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/flood. The PowerPoint slides also are available as handouts.

NDSU’s flood website also has many other resources to help with flood recovery, including money management, replacing lost documents, learning how to be resilient, dealing with your emotions, helping your children deal with stress, salvaging crops and restoring flooded farm equipment.

Other sources of flood recovery information include Disaster Recovery Log, the NDSU Extension Service’s new smartphone application; Recovery After Disaster: The Family Financial Toolkit, a free, online resource the NDSU Extension Service and University of Minnesota Extension developed; and North Dakota’s new disaster recovery information website.

The Disaster Recovery Log app lets users record information about damages as they enter their flooded homes using text, images and audio. This information is essential for possible insurance and/or government reimbursement. The app also connects people to NDSU’s flood recovery information.

It’s available free through the Android market. For more information about the app, visit http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/extension/apps.

Recovery After Disaster: The Family Financial Toolkit is a hands-on program to help users learn key financial recovery strategies, identify helpful resources and explore their options as they make financial decisions. It’s available at http://www.extension.umn.edu/family/tough-times/disaster-recovery/family-financial-toolkit.

North Dakota’s disaster recovery resources website, at http://nddisasterinfo.com/, provides a one-stop resource for individuals and businesses affected by disasters. This site pulls together information from a variety of federal and state agencies, as well as private-sector partners, who provide funding and informational resources during disasters.

NDSU Agriculture Communication - July 22, 2011