Handling flooded cars and mold

HAMPTON ROADS, Va. (WAVY) - Heavy rain pounded the Hampton Roads area Tuesday evening, causing significant flooding in both the Peninsula cities and the Southside.

10 On Your Side looked into ways you can keep your vehicle safe during flooding, as well as keeping your items from molding.

Experts say it is important never to try to restart a car if it stalls in high water.

"What's going to happen is you're going to suck water into the intact of the car, get it into the cylinders," service manager Joe Bosher said. "You're going to try to combust that water and you can't compress water it's going to damage the engine."

The damage can not only be physically catastrophic, but can take a lot of money to repair.

"It will actually pit a hole in the side of the engine.  It can destroy your engine," Bosher said.

The damage from floodwaters is not limited to the car's engine.

"A lot of computers are underneath the carpets of these cars," Bosher said. "Anything in the car's run by computers. Water gets into the computers, into the harnesses and all that and it's like a plague that goes through the whole system."

First Atlantic Restoration's Bart Brown says mold will show up in water damaged areas.

"It's gonna be discoloration," First Atlantic Restoration's Bart Brown said. "It's gonna be usually dark in color, may be spotty.  But if you've had an area that's been wet for some, some amount of time, mold can grow as soon as 48 hours."

Which is why you should act quickly, even before the experts arrive.

"The best thing to do if you have a leak or a wet area get it dried out as quickly as possible, you know, a shop vacuum," Brown said. "Anything you can do to mitigate as much of the damage to get as much of the moisture out of there as possible, quickly, is going to help in the long run to make sure you're preventing any kind of contamination from growing."