Flood Water Reached My Jars and My Garden

Discard home-canned jars that were in contact with flood water. Québec’s post-flood guidance names home canned goods among the room-temperature foods to throw out.

Commercial cans are the documented exception — and your jars are not commercial cans. A seamed metal can is watertight. A two-piece lid held by a vacuum against a glass rim is not the same object, and that difference is the whole page.

Why the commercial-can exception doesn’t transfer

This is the part people get wrong, because the government advice about cans is real and easy to over-apply.

	Commercial can	Home canning jar
Closure	Seamed metal, no removable part	Single-use lid held by vacuum against a glass rim
Designed to	Be sealed shut permanently	Keep air out during shelf storage
Submersion	Watertight — contents never touch the water	Not designed for it, and not testable afterwards
Québec’s verdict	Keep, after inspection and cleaning	Among the foods to discard

Even for commercial cans the exception is conditional. Québec says to inspect each one and discard any that is bulging, punctured, broken, badly rusted, leaking, holed, or too crushed to stack or open normally — then to clean, rinse and dry the outside before opening, and to check that the contents look normal once open.

None of that procedure is extended to home preserves, and we are not going to extend it either. Washing the outside of a jar does not resolve what you cannot establish about the seal.

What flood water actually is

Worth stating plainly, because “it was only water” is the reasoning this page exists to interrupt.

Flood water is not clean water. It carries sewage, fuel, agricultural runoff, and whatever was in the building and the ground it crossed to reach your shelf. A burst supply pipe is a different case from a sewage backup — but in both, the thing you cannot determine afterwards is the same: whether anything got past the rim, and what it was.

Québec notes the same precautions may apply to other water damage, not only a flood.

The seal is not the answer here

On most pages of this site the seal is the test. On this one it isn’t, and it’s worth being explicit about why.

• A firm seal tells you a vacuum is holding now. It says nothing about what happened at the rim while the jar was underwater.
• The outside of the jar is contaminated regardless of the seal — as is the underside of the band, the shelf, and everything the water reached.
• Not smell. Botulinum toxin is odourless. HealthLink BC: contaminated food “may look and smell normal.”
• Not taste. Québec: “Do not taste any food that looks unusual, is foaming or smells bad.”

Québec’s own line, on the flood page and the storage page alike: when in doubt, throw it out.

The flooded garden

Québec’s instruction is direct: after a flood, discard fruit, vegetables and herbs that grew above ground — strawberries and lettuce are the examples given.

That is the part of this page most likely to matter on a preserving site in spring. A flooded row of berries is not a harvest to salvage into jam, and the fact that it looks fine is not the test.

Root crops raise a further question about soil contamination that a general page should not answer. If your garden flooded, that one goes to your local public health authority, who know what was in the water in your area.

How to dispose of it

HealthLink BC’s steps, which apply here as anywhere:

1. Place the contents in a waterproof container.
2. Put that container in the garbage.
3. Do not feed it to pets or other animals.
4. Wash your hands well with warm soapy water.
5. Wash every utensil and surface the food, the container, or your hands may have touched.

Do not compost flood-contaminated produce, and treat the shelving and the storage area as part of the cleanup rather than as a place to put the survivors back.

If a lid is bulging, do not open it at all — bin it sealed and read the bulging-lid page.

The jars themselves are salvageable. Glass can be washed and sanitised, and the rim checked with a fingertip. The lids cannot — they were single-use before the flood.

Next time

• Store jars off the floor. A shelf 30 cm up survives what a box on concrete does not.
• Not the basement floor, not under the stairs, in a building with any history of water.
• Keep the inventory somewhere else — a phone photo of the shelf is enough — so you know what you lost without opening anything.
• Bands off in storage anyway, which is the standing advice and makes a compromised jar easier to spot.

Related

• The power went out and my freezer is full — the other disaster question, with a different answer
• There’s rust on my canning lid or band — what moisture on the sealing surface means
• How to tell if home-canned food has gone bad — the inspection routine
• My canning jar is leaking in storage — a seal that failed for ordinary reasons

If anyone has eaten from a jar you now doubt and develops double or blurred vision, drooping eyelids, slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, a dry mouth or muscle weakness — call 911 or go to an emergency department immediately. Botulism antitoxin works best given early. Do not wait to see whether it passes.