The First 24 Hours After a Water Loss

A supply line lets go, a water heater fails, a washing machine hose splits while everyone is at work. By the time you find it, the question is not what happened. It is what to do in the next few hours, because that window changes how much of it you keep.

If there is any question about electricity, structural damage or sewage, stop reading and get everyone out. Everything below assumes the property is safe to be in.

Stop the water

Find the shut-off and close it. If you do not know where yours is, this is the reason to find out on a normal day rather than a bad one. It is usually where the supply enters the building, in a garage, a crawlspace, a basement or an exterior box.

Make the two calls

• Your insurer. Open the claim before work starts, not after. Ask what your policy actually covers and whether they want you to use a particular company.
• A restoration company. Sooner is materially better, and not for sales reasons. The difference between contents leaving on day one and day five is often the difference between cleaning them and replacing them.

Photograph everything before you tidy

This is the step people skip because tidying feels productive. Take far more photographs than seem necessary: wide shots of each room, then close shots of anything wet or damaged, and get the water line on walls and furniture legs before it dries and disappears.

You cannot go back and take these later. Nothing you photograph can be argued about afterwards.

Get what you can up off the floor

Anything light and portable, especially paper, textiles and electronics, goes somewhere dry. Put foil or a block under furniture legs so wooden feet stop sitting in water and staining the carpet through. Do not start dragging heavy pieces on your own: soaked furniture is far heavier than it looks and this is where people hurt their backs.

Move air, do not move heat

Open windows if it is drier outside than in. Run fans. What not to do is turn the heating up to "dry it out faster" while everything is still shut: warm damp air with nowhere to go is how you get a mold problem on top of a water problem.

What not to do

• Do not use a household vacuum on standing water. Wrong tool, and a genuinely dangerous one.
• Do not throw anything away yet. Not even things that look ruined. Everything discarded before it is documented is something your adjuster never sees.
• Do not assume it dried. Surfaces dry long before what is behind them does. This is the single most common reason a water loss becomes a mold job.
• Do not start pulling material out yourself. What comes out and what stays is part of the claim.

Start a note on your phone

Every call, who you spoke to, what they said, and when. Every company that turns up. This takes two minutes a day and it is what you will want in six weeks when four organisations are involved and each has a different account of the timeline.

Then the contents come out

Once the water is stopped and the claim is open, the belongings need to leave so the building can be dried and repaired. That is contents restoration, and it is a separate job from fixing the building.

CCR is IICRC certified in water. Here is what happens in a pack-out, step by step.