One of my units got destroyed last night in a flood. What do I do now?

[Brandon Turner]

yep, about a foot of water in my basement apartment in my triplex. Called the flood insurance company, but my deductible is fairly high ($5k) so I'm looking to still do this cleanup on the cheap. Anybody have any good ideas? 

UPDATE: See photos and continuing story below in this thread! :) 

[Jon Holdman]

Been there, done that, as you know, @Brandon Turner 

What was the source of the water?  If it was a burst pipe or a hole in the roof with rainwater coming your landlord insurance will cover it.  If the water touched the ground and then came into your property, the only insurance that would cover it would be national flood insurance.  Flood insurance doesn't cover much, even if it does apply.

Get to a rental store and rent a pump.  A good one will move  a LOT of water quickly.

Get a BIG shop vac and go to town to get the remaining water after the pump has reached its limit.

If the water got into electrical boxes, open those and pull out the devices.  Don't disconnect, just leave them hanging to dry out.  They will probably be fine.  Ours were.

Get the wet sheet rock and any insulation out of there.  Any flooring, too.  Its probably not salvageable.  Get anything that's wet other than framing out.

Center for Disease Control and FEMA both have remediation information on their web sites. We followed the CDC process of bleaching and scrubbing the framing and basement walls. Do that as soon as you have the water out.

If you have hollow core doors, they now have water inside them.  Drill holes in the bottom to drain them.  Or just plan on replacing them.  We were able to salvage most of ours.  Really would have been better to just replace them and that may be something we still end up doing.

Get fans and dehumidifiers in there.  We rented dehumidifiers at first, but the ended up buying one on amazon.  The rentals add up.  But you have to do something to get the humidity down so the framing can dry out.   Fans to circulate the air.  Ideally, some of those super powerful fans that blow right along the floor.

Get a moisture meter off amazon and monitor the water content of the framing.  IIRC we were told to get it below 10% in the studs and floor plates.  This took a few weeks of running the dehumidifiers and fans.  Its quite dry here, so your goal may be different in your area.  And I may be mis-remembering that number.  The building inspector was the one who specified the number.

Now fix all the damage.