Now that it's over, I'm kind of glad the hot water heater died and leaked water all over the downstairs. It prompted a massive cleaning the likes of which haven't been seen in this house in many years.
I'll start out by saying there was plenty of junk downstairs. Things collect when you stay in the same place for enough time, and it's almost always stuff on the fringe of usefulness, so throwing it away isn't quite tenable. For a lot of it, all it took was for it to get wet, and the realization that space was going to become a problem — not to mention a lot more work — if the next choice was to find a place for it or get rid of it.
So: Instant trash, just add water. We now have a lot more space.
In addition to getting a pile of crap hauled off about four or five years later than it should have been, some water damage experts came in at the insurance company's recommendation to assess the damage and do restoration and recovery. I've seen companies like this in action before. The office where I used to work was near a flood-prone creek, and the basement flooded a few times during my tenure — severely enough once that there were a few inches of standing water in the floor and a warning to not go downstairs unless absolutely necessary (and an office-wide hand sanitizer distribution shortly afterward).
Anyway, they brought their equipment in and got to work. One of the things they used was like a vacuum cleaner with a large flat "brush" part with the sole purpose of sucking up water. They took lots of pictures, moved things around as needed, cleaned up the rug they could save, and removed the carpet remnant we were using as floor covering in the utility room. They left us with seven big fans and a dehumidifier the size of a medium refrigerator, all of which will be running through Monday to make sure everything is thoroughly dry. That's an energy drain of 255 kWh, I'll add, but I guess it's better than mold growing all over the place.
Things have already dried out quite a bit, and I personally think the potential for mold is already gone. I'm no expert at this, though. Hopefully these cleanup people are. I'm going to add there were some massive storms around here yesterday, so a lot of people are dealing with much worse flooding and cleanup than I am... and I'm trying to keep my mess in perspective.
One more thing of note. The Kanawha County Recycling Center now has an area at their Slack Street location where you can drop off broken electronics for proper disposal. This is both awesome and overdue, and I plan to use it in the near future for one last load of obsolete and broken technology.