The water destroyed album covers, including a radio station-only Talking Heads, a Japanese pressing of “Meet the Beatles” and even the Crooked Beat Records’ owner Bill Daly’s first ever album, “Indian Reservation” by the Raiders. That’s a record Daly got when he was eight years old.
Now the record store is cleaning up and deciding whether to stay at its Alexandria, Virginia, location after two floods hit the business.
Daly sifted through pressing of Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen and a $400 recording of the Ronettes as they were all neatly placed in a room with multiple fans running on full blast, drying them out. He told WTOP that around 400 records, worth tens of thousands of dollars, were destroyed in a flood that took place at Crooked Beat Records on Sunday, Jan. 11.
“I looked at the cameras, and I saw water coming in like a creek,” Daly said. “I just basically got down here and tried to start saving whatever.”
Around five inches of standing water filled the basement store, damaging any albums stored on lower shelves. The records will still play, but the value of many of these rare albums is destroyed as the covers are ruined by water damage.
According to Daly, it took over seven hours for a plumber to arrive to start fixing the issue and removing the water that had been pouring in.
They had an entire crew the next morning attempting to pump out the water. But even as they attempted to clean up, the basement flooded again on Tuesday while crews were working.
It’s not exactly clear why the store flooded. Plumbers told Daly that there were issues with sump pumps in the building and the ground was highly saturated.
Daly often buys many of his rarest records from estate sales, and he had just gotten several new batches that he was processing and getting ready to put out for customers.
“They were above ground … about three inches above the ground over here. And unfortunately, all those got hit,” Daly said. “It’s records that go back to 50 or 60 years of stuff that is just completely destroyed. I mean you name the band. We lost a lot of my lot of Clash records, Bruce Springsteen records, Louis Armstrong records, Ramones records, and I guess we’re going to have some kind of a Noah’s Ark submerged sale on all these records.”
He said while these records still play, their collectable value has been brought down by about 90% because of the water-damaged covers.
“It’s quite devastating,” Daly added.
Crooked Beat Records has been at its current location on Mount Vernon Avenue in the Del Ray neighborhood for three years but has been open for nearly three decades. And over those years, Daly said they grew a huge base of dedicated customers that have shown an outpouring of support for the vinyl store.
“We’re really appreciative of that because we just don’t know what our future is going to be here at this location,” he said. “We’ve got to discuss things with the landlord, we’d love to stay in Del Ray, but we can’t have something like this happen again.”
Daly said the store is closed to shoppers who want to sift through their collection until further notice; he speculated that they would be reopened by the end of the month. But the business still offers online purchases that can be mailed or for pick up at the storefront.
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