Daughter hit a large puddle on her way home from college and side swiped a guard rail. After the hit she lost power steering. She muscled it to the next exit and we got her home from there. She got fractured wrist I and the ins get the roughly $3500 bill for passenger side doors and body repair. Ins co says they won't cover the steering till we show them how the accident caused it. The tires didn't show any signs of contact with anything. I've been thru 10 pages searching for steering with no results. Car gets out of the body shop within 2 days and I'm trying to get a head start on this. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Ron

 

Does the power assist work now? I would have expected that the serpentine belt could have gotten wet enough to allow slippage, but would work after drying out. The system is pretty much sealed except for a vent hole in the reservoir.
Has any shop looked at the steering to determine if it is functional or what needs repair if it is not? Hard to figure out what's the cause when you don't know what's broken, if anything. If you fed a spinning serpentine belt a large slug of water, it would get between the pulley(s) and the belt. If you fed it enough, you could have a tensioner that got 'sprung back' so far that it no longer was tensioning the belt. Might want to take a look at all that stuff.
tom

 

Well, glad to hear she is at least in one piece but a fractured wrist is no fun.

What engine does it have? I-4's have electric power steering so the impact could have dislodged something but I would just be guessing. Good luck.

 

rufus ... per the shop manual, only the hybrids have electrically assisted steering. The 4 & 6 both have vane type pumps powering hydraulic assist.
Unless they made a 'running change'....
tom

 

My bad, it didn't show up until 2008.... disregard.

2008 Mercury Mariner

 

I did get a very short time to look over it after the tow truck dropped it off at the body shop. Belt should've been dry by then and still was hard for me to turn. When just barely moving the wheel back and forth I could hear something down low between drivers side tire and head light/bumper that's hard to describe. Hope to get it back Wednesday so I can start getting into it. Thanks and I'll keep y'all posted.

 

If she hit the guard rail and crammed a wheel into it, there may have been damage to the spool valve in the rack & pinion. That is located on the rack & pinion over near the bottom of the steering column.
The spool valve is a torsion operated valve, where you twist a bar of metal that in turn twists a valve open, the opened valve allowing PS pressure to go to one side or the other of the rack. Once the rack has started moving, with the valve still twisted, it allows the valve to close a bit as you now have pressure assisting the motion. If the torsion bar got broken, which is possible, given that the steering wheel gave such a good wrench to her arm, it won't provide any assist as the valve will not open to allow pressure to either side of the rack.
Makes me think you need a new or re-man rack. Damaged by the accident, feedback from a wheel pushing on the rack, breaking the spool valve and your daughters arm/wrist in the process. Big time feedback.
tom

 

Thanks Tom hopefully I'll get to look at it tomorrow.