Rug Cleaning in San Marco

This neighborhood floods a little, often, and that is a completely different problem from flooding a lot, once. The river is tidal here and it is brackish here, roughly twenty miles from the ocean, so on a king tide — the perigean spring tides that come round in the autumn, with no storm involved at all — water backs up through the storm drains and stands in the low streets for an hour or two either side of high water. It is shallow, it is dirty, it drains away by itself, and nobody files anything. What it does to a rug is cumulative rather than dramatic. Each event wets the bottom two or three inches of the foundation with slightly salty water and then leaves it to dry in a humid room, and salt does not evaporate. It stays in the fibre, and because salt is hygroscopic it keeps that band of the rug wetter than the rest of it for the whole year, which is why the damage here always has the same shape: a stripe of weak, dark, sour foundation along one edge with three sound sides above it. Owners generally read it as a spill. It is a salt load, it builds up over several seasons, and the only thing that removes it is flushing with clean water until the rinse runs clear.