Shut the water off at the main, keep away from standing water near outlets, photograph everything before anything moves, and call. Those four things fill the first ten minutes, and everything else in the first day follows from how quickly they happen.
A burst supply line moves a surprising amount of water. It runs downhill through the floor structure, along joists, into the ceiling below and out along the plates at the bottom of the walls, and it does all of that while the surface you can see looks like an ordinary puddle. The point of the first day is to get ahead of that spread while the water is still clean.
The first hour, in order
- Close the main shut off valve. In most houses here it sits near where the service line enters the basement, often beside the meter.
- If water is anywhere near outlets, appliances or a panel, switch the circuit off at the breaker before walking through it, and stay out if you cannot do that safely.
- Photograph the source, the standing water and every room the water reached, before anything is moved.
- Call a restoration company. A person answers at DHL at any hour and a technician sets an arrival time.
- Move what you can lift off the wet floor, and put foil or a plastic lid under furniture legs so the finish does not bleed into the carpet.
- Open interior doors so air can move, and leave the heat on in cold weather.
- Do not use bleach on wet building materials, and do not run a household vacuum over standing water.
The photographs are the step people skip and cannot get back. Ten photographs taken while the water is still down are worth more than an hour of explanation to an adjuster next week.
What the technician does on arrival
The order is set by the standard, not by the size of the puddle. ANSI/IICRC S500 puts assessment before extraction, because the assessment decides what the extraction is allowed to leave behind.
- A category assessment: clean supply water is category 1, water that has picked up contamination is category 2, and ground water or sewage is category 3.
- A class assessment: how much material is wet, and how absorbent it is, which sets how much equipment the room needs.
- Moisture mapping with meters, including inside wall cavities and under the floor, so the edge of the wet area is measured and not guessed.
- Extraction of standing water, which is the cheapest water to remove because it has not yet gone into a material.
- Removal of material the category rules out saving, which on a clean water job is often nothing at all.
- Equipment placement, then the first row of the drying log.
Extraction comes before evaporation for a simple reason. Water pulled out as a liquid is water a dehumidifier never has to take out of the air, and the difference shows up in how many days the equipment stands in the room.
Why speed changes what can be saved
A burst supply line starts as category 1, clean and sanitary water. Under S500 category 1 materials can usually be dried in place, which is why a fast call often ends with the carpet and pad still down and the room back in use. Water that sits picks up soil and contamination from the materials it is resting on, and as it climbs to category 2 the pad and the lower drywall stop being salvageable.
There is a second clock behind that one. The EPA advises drying water damaged areas and items within 24 to 48 hours to prevent mold growth. Those two clocks are the whole argument for calling on the night it happens rather than in the morning.
Hours two to twenty four
Once the equipment is placed, the room stops being a scene and becomes a measurement. Air movers push air across wet surfaces so evaporation keeps up, and a dehumidifier takes that moisture out of the air before it can settle somewhere colder in the house. The equipment stays running through the night. Turning it off because it is loud is the most common way a job that was nearly finished goes back a day.
Readings are taken at set monitoring points, and S500 asks for temperature, relative humidity, specific humidity and grain depression to be recorded at each point on every day the project is active. That log is what proves the material reached a dry standard instead of merely feeling dry to a hand at the end of the week.
Drying is finished when the readings at those points hold at a dry standard, and no set number of days decides it. Hardwood, plaster and concrete take longer than carpet, because they hold water inside the material and give it back slowly.
The insurance side of the first day
Standard homeowners policies carry a duty to mitigate, which asks you to take reasonable steps to limit further damage after a loss. Calling on the night of the failure is that step, and the receipts and photographs from the first day are the record of it.
DHL photographs the damage and takes the moisture readings, so you have a complete file to give your insurer. The business does not file, adjust or negotiate the claim, because that is regulated work between you and your carrier. What a well documented first day gives you is a file the adjuster can follow: Does homeowners insurance cover water damage in New Jersey covers what that file contains.
What not to do
- Do not put a household vacuum into standing water.
- Do not lift wet wall to wall carpet yourself. It stretches, it tears at the seams, and a technician may have been able to dry it where it lay.
- Do not use bleach on wet building materials. The EPA does not recommend a biocide such as chlorine bleach as a routine practice, and it does nothing about the water still inside the wall.
- Do not close the room up and wait to see whether it dries.
- Do not throw material out before it has been photographed.
The whole method, from the assessment to the last reading, is on the Water Damage Restoration page, and the same team covers Passaic County and the five other counties at any hour by appointment.
This article is about Burst Pipe, Frozen Pipe and Appliance Leak Damage.