3rd gen flooded while off-roading

I made a HUGE mistake and let my soon-to-be ex take my truck off-roading with his brother. My truck has a 6” lift and 35” MTs so they were joyriding in a sandy, watery area. When he got back (after stopping at a car wash first) he said “a little water” got in through the front passenger side when he got stuck and had to get winched out. After pressing for more details he said it was 2” worth of water. However upon inspection it looks like it was a lot more. The entire cab’s carpet is soaked. Not the seats luckily. I checked the rear seats and underneath them is also soaked. I have subwoofers behind the rear seats but they seem dry. What kind of damage am I looking at? What should we do to mitigate future problems? I checked other threads about flooding but this was only a few minutes being in deep water and I don’t know how high on the front it was since he’s not being honest so I’m assuming the worst and engine mostly submerged.
I’m so pissed I can’t even look at him right now. He said we built it for off-roading and I said not off-roading in deep waters!
I’m sure some of you will be laughing at this post, but this Tacoma is my prized possession and I want to keep it for life. It only has 55k miles and has a lot of life left if it doesn’t get totaled sooner! I’ve learned my lesson not to let anyone else drive it again.

 

Pull the seats and carpet. Sit the carpet out to dry(even clean it). Check all wire connections. If he's lying, sounds like a real piece of shit. Things happen, that's life. I personally would never trust anyone that lied over something so simple.

 

Yes pull carpet and let it air dry out side of truck. Maybe let the truck air out with some fans or run the a/c on max and on circulate for a few hours with the doors shut and windows up. This will take care of some of the humidity inside. One carpet is installed then get some absorbent packs that people put in gunsafes.
I can't think of anything else, hopefully it wasn't salt water. There's alot of wiring behind the kick panel in the passenger floorboard on 2nd gens. Probably similar on 3rd gens. Not sure on how to handle the wiring beside maybe spraying down plugs with contact cleaner if they appear to have gotten wet.

 

Definitely pull the carpet to dry it, mold sucks.
Pull the air box apart, you should be able to see if water made it inside.
Might want to change your diff fluid too, if you don't have extended breathers.
I believe the trans and transfer breathers are already pretty high up but if the diffs are bad I would probably check them too.

 

Carpets out, plugs out, windows down. AC on windows up anytime its running.

Even leaving the windows cracked helps.

Check for water in the doors, they should self drain but sometimes mud blocks the drains and the water gets trapped.

 

Only 6 inch lift? If you had gone 8 inches it would probably been fine

Just kidding sorry about your truck. Gotta be careful loaning out your toys I guess

 

Dry up as much water as possible, toss a dehumidifier in it, and let it run for a few days non stop only shutting it off to empty the container. replace all fluids, don't get cheap, fluids may not be cheap but they are far cheaper then metal bits. Inspect the air filter, is it wet or does it look like it was wet? If the engine runs OK you may be lucky. Hydrolock is a stone cold b--ch though.

 

air filter is dry, this happened yesterday and have had fans blowing inside and a dehumidifier running since it’s in garage now. He drove it home after getting it wet, it was a 2 hour drive back.

 

Did he or his buddies post any pics/videos to social media?

 

There's a lesson here in only loaning things out you're ok with never getting back.

Maybe you've reached the point this truck is that way, I respect that. But if you expected it back, I'd take it to a cleaner and forward the bill to them--it's the cost of their fun using other people's stuff.

Absolutely take the seats and carpets out. Any less is asking for problems later. There's also electrical connections that need to be dried out under the seats, and potentially elsewhere near the firewall or back cabin wall depending on how high the water got. If they're not they'll fail from the corrosion.

 

WD40 all the reachable electrical connections pronto (with the vehicle OFF)

 

What????

 

I would go through all of his social media and download the videos and then find a lawyer and sue his ass and his idiot brother.

If I lend my truck to somebody, that doesn’t give him carte blanche to destroy it.

 

No they didn’t. Convenient

 

glad you were able to learn a new tip/trick today

 

This is one of those things like loaning money. Only loan as much as you’d be willing to give as a gift. If someone borrows your car, be mentally prepared for them to total it, because you can’t control what will happen.

If it were my truck. I’d first try just opening the doors and get some fans blowing on the carpets for several hours. Pulling the seats and carpet would certainly be more thorough, but I’m lazy. If I can press my hand into the carpet/padding and it comes up dry, good’nuff for me.

 

I had an old leaky convertible with far less electronics.


You can use a whole lot of towels to dab the floor mostly dry, just keep in mind you're trying to pull the moisture up from both the visible carpet and the underlying insulation (jute) layer below it, so even a heavyweight champion is going to have sore arms afterwards from forcing the towels down to get through the layers.

Alternatively, you need a wet/dry shop vac, and a garden hose. Re-soak a floorboard with the garden hose-- this step is needed to flush and dilute the dirty water, then suck up with the wet vac until the sucked up water starts running clear. Then come back and dab mostly dry with towels.

The shop vac method will take a lot less towels, but no less overall effort. And you're still pushing the muddy water around, so there's still a high chance that whatever bacteria is in the body of water they went through will die off, and start stinking things up in a few days.

 

^^^^

Shop vac is a good idea. I would definitely apply that before the fans.

They didn’t call it “Water Displacement (formula) 40” for nuffin.

 

It's really preferable to disconnect any electrical connectors, blow them out with compressed air, then a touch of wd-40 on a brush would be ok. Though dielectric grease would be far better

But wd-40 is electrically conductive. So soaking every electrical connector in it will introduce numerous electrical issues as everything shorts out across the grease film

 

This seems...excessive..