Water damage guides
Work out what you are dealing with, what to do first, and which trade handles it — before you start calling people.
Find out who to call
Answer a few questions about what happened. You get the safety steps and the right trade whether or not you leave contact details.
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Overview
Most people looking for help with water in a building do not know what to search for, because the thing they can see is rarely the thing that is wrong. A stain on a ceiling is not a ceiling problem. Water along the bottom of a basement wall after heavy rain and water across the middle of the floor from a failed pipe look similar for about ten minutes and then turn out to need completely different trades, different equipment and, often, different policies.
That is what this section is for. Each guide starts from something you can actually observe — where the water is, when it appeared, what the weather was doing — and works back to the likely cause and the type of professional who handles it. That ordering matters, because calling the wrong trade costs a day, and with water a day is expensive. Materials that could have been dried and kept become materials that have to be cut out and replaced, and the point at which that changes is measured in days, not weeks.
There are three things worth knowing before you read any of them. First, the trade you need depends on the cause, not the mess: a plumber stops water, a restoration contractor dries the building, and they are not the same company or the same bill. Second, the clock that matters is the drying clock — federal guidance on mold is built around getting wet materials dry quickly rather than around cleaning up afterwards. Third, what you write down and photograph in the first hours is the only record that will exist later, and it is worth more than anything you can reconstruct.
None of these pages tell you what a job will cost, because that depends on the building, and a range invented for a web page would be a guess dressed up as information. Where a page cannot tell you something honestly, it says so and points you at whoever can — a licensed plumber, your insurer, the state contractor register.
If you would rather answer a few questions than read, the diagnostic tool covers the same ground and tells you which trade handles your situation and what to do while you wait.
Common questions
What should I do in the first hour?
Make the area safe, stop the water if you can reach a shut-off, and photograph everything before you move anything. After that the priority is getting air moving and materials drying, because the difference between drying something and replacing it is usually measured in days.
Do I need a plumber or a restoration company?
Usually both, in that order. A plumber finds and stops the source; a restoration contractor dries the structure and deals with what the water damaged. A restoration firm is not automatically licensed to do plumbing work, so check rather than assume.
Why do none of these pages give prices?
Because the cost depends on the building, how far the water travelled and how long it sat, and none of that is knowable from a web page. The cost section explains what actually drives the number and how to compare two estimates.