A supply line lets go under the kitchen sink, or the water heater in the garage finally gives up, and by the time you notice it the floor is wet three rooms away. What you do in the next few hours decides how much of the house has to come apart. Water damage is one of the few household emergencies where the cost is set less by the failure itself than by how long the building stayed wet.
- Shut the water off first, then the power to affected areas, then call a mitigation crew. In that order.
- Mold can begin growing in damp building materials within roughly 24 to 48 hours, which is why drying is urgent rather than merely important.
- Photograph everything before you move or throw away anything. Your claim is built on that documentation.
- Mitigation and rebuild are two separate jobs. Get the first one moving today, price the second one later.
1. Stop the water
Find the shutoff. Under a sink there is usually an angle stop on the wall behind the fixture. For a water heater there is a valve on the cold inlet at the top of the tank. If you cannot isolate it, use the main shutoff for the house, typically at the front of the property near the meter or where the supply enters the building. If you have never located yours, do it on a dry Saturday, not while standing in an inch of water.
If the source is a sewer backup or anything coming up out of a drain, stop using every fixture in the house immediately. Every flush and every load of laundry adds to it.
2. Kill the power to wet areas
Water and electricity in the same room is where a bad day becomes a fatal one. If water reached outlets, baseboards with wiring behind them, or a panel, shut off the affected circuits at the breaker, and do not walk into standing water to get there. If the panel is in the wet area, call the utility or an electrician instead of improvising.
3. Call a mitigation crew, not a general contractor
This is the part homeowners get backwards. Your first call is to a certified water damage restoration company with extraction and drying equipment on the truck, available at any hour. We are a general contractor. If you call us at 11pm with water on the floor, we are going to tell you to call Supraclean at (408) 216-0118, because they are IICRC certified, they answer 24/7, and the equipment matters more tonight than the cabinetry does.
Speed is not a sales pitch here. Mold can establish itself in wet drywall, insulation, and framing within about 24 to 48 hours under the right conditions, and once it does, a drying job turns into a containment and remediation job.
4. Document before you clean up
Before anything gets moved, photograph and video every room, every wet surface, the source of the failure, and the contents. Get wide shots that establish the room and close shots that show the damage. Photograph serial numbers and model plates on any failed appliance. Keep the failed part itself: the burst flex line, the split fitting, the cracked valve. Insurers and their engineers want to see it, and once it is in a dumpster your account of what happened is just an account.
Keep every receipt from the emergency: the hotel, the fans you bought, the plumber who came at midnight. Most policies cover reasonable emergency mitigation expenses and additional living expenses, but only what you can prove.
5. Notify your insurer, and understand what happens next
Call your carrier or agent and open the claim. Policies require prompt notice and require you to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage, so calling a mitigation company is not jumping the gun, it is what the policy asks of you. Be factual about what happened and when you discovered it, because the sudden versus gradual question is the hinge the whole claim turns on. We cover that in detail in does insurance cover water damage in California.
6. Move what you can save
Get contents up off wet floors: rugs, boxes, electronics, anything paper, anything upholstered. Put foil or wood blocks under furniture legs so the finish does not bleed into wet carpet. Open interior doors and closets so air can move. Do not run your household HVAC if the loss involved sewage or if the system itself got wet, since that pushes contamination through the whole house.
7. Do not try to dry it yourself
Box fans and an open window feel productive. They are not drying a wall cavity. Structural drying is a measured process: moisture meters establish where the water traveled, air movers and dehumidifiers are placed by calculation, and readings are logged daily until materials hit a dry standard. A clean water loss in an average home usually takes three to five days on equipment. A floor that feels dry to your hand is routinely still wet inside the subfloor and the bottom plate, and building over that is how you get mold behind brand new baseboard.
What happens after the drying
Once the moisture readings come back to standard, mitigation is done and the rebuild starts. That is the second job: drywall, flooring, cabinets, paint, and the permits if the damage went past cosmetic. It is worth getting the rebuild scoped and priced while the equipment is still running, so the work starts the day the fans come out instead of two weeks later. That is the half we handle, and you can see the full scope on our water damage repair and rebuild page.