Water Damage Restoration in Rochester, WA

Rochester is an unincorporated farm town in the southwest corner of Thurston County, where the Black River comes down out of the prairie to meet the Chehalis. Highway 12 runs through it on the way to the coast, Interstate 5 passes a few miles east at Grand Mound, and the housing is spread across Independence Valley and the prairie: 1900s farmhouses on the river bottom, 1970s and 1980s ranch houses on acreage along James Road and Littlerock Road, and manufactured homes on wells and septic. A few thousand people live in the school district, and most of them know exactly how high the river got in 2007.

The Chehalis is the most flood-prone river in western Washington, and Rochester sits at the bottom of its Thurston County reach. The early December 2007 atmospheric river dropped more than a foot of rain on the Willapa Hills in two days, and the Chehalis put Interstate 5 under water for four days and filled houses across Independence Valley with mud. January 2009 did it again. The December 2015 and November 2021 storms brought the river back up on saturated ground. Between floods, the winter water table under the valley sits high enough that crawl spaces near the river are damp from Thanksgiving to April.

This site connects Rochester homeowners with an independent local water damage provider by phone. The provider looks at what the river or the ground did before setting the scope.

Rochester water damage after the Chehalis comes up

Brown water and mud in a farmhouse or a daylight basement on the valley floor is a storm and river flood cleanup, and carpet, drywall, and insulation the river touched come out to a line above the high-water mark. A crawl space that stays wet all winter under a ranch house on the bottomland is a crawl space water extraction with a longer drying run than most. After the tear-out, structural drying runs until the framing and slab read dry.

Who watches the river and who runs the schools

Flood warnings for this reach of the river come through the Chehalis River Basin Flood Authority, the group of cities and counties formed after the 2007 flood to coordinate warning gauges and flood projects across the basin. Rebuild permits for a Rochester house go through the county's permit desk in Olympia; the pumping and drying need none.

The Rochester School District serves the valley and the prairie around it, and in flood years its buses are the first to know which roads are under.

Call (360) 364-8868 and say how high the water got and whether it has stopped rising. We put you through to an independent local water damage provider serving Rochester.