Water damage is a clock. Wood starts absorbing water the moment it’s wet. Drywall wicks moisture upward. Carpet padding holds water against the subfloor. Mold spores can activate within 24 to 48 hours of moisture exposure. What you do in the first day determines how much of your home gets saved — and how smoothly your insurance claim goes.
Here’s the order of operations, based on how we handle water damage restoration jobs across Vancouver, Camas, Battle Ground, and the Portland metro.
Hour one: stop the water
If the water is coming from inside the house — a burst pipe, a failed supply line, an overflowing appliance — shut off the water main. In most Clark County homes it’s in the crawl space, the garage, or a covered box near the street. If you don’t know where yours is, find it today, before you need it. Turning a valve in the first five minutes can be the difference between one wet room and three wet floors.
If the water is coming from outside — a roof leak in a winter storm, groundwater in the basement — you can’t shut it off, but you can slow it. Buckets under active drips. Towels at door thresholds. Move what’s directly under the leak.
Cut power to wet areas, if you can do it safely
Water and energized outlets don’t mix. If water is near outlets, cords, or your electrical panel, switch off the breakers for the affected rooms — but only if you can reach the panel without standing in water. If the panel itself is in a flooded area, stay out and call your utility.
Figure out what kind of water you’re dealing with
Restoration crews sort water into three categories, and the category changes what’s safe for you to touch.
- Clean water from a supply line, a water heater, or rain. Safe to handle.
- Gray water from a washing machine, dishwasher, or tub drain. Mildly contaminated — gloves at minimum.
- Sewage from a toilet backup, floor drain, or outside flooding. Genuinely hazardous. Don’t wade in it, don’t run a shop vac through it, and keep kids and pets out of the area. That’s a sewage cleanup situation, and it follows different rules.
One more wrinkle: gray water that sits for about 48 hours becomes sewage-level contaminated as bacteria grow. Another reason the first day matters.
Document everything before you move anything
Your insurance claim gets decided on documentation. Before you start moving furniture or pulling up rugs, take photos and video of every affected room — wide shots and close-ups, the water source, the standing water, the waterline on the walls. Open cabinets and shoot inside them. You can’t over-document.
When we arrive, we add moisture readings, thermal imaging, and a documented scope to your photos, and we submit that package to your carrier. Adjusters approve claims based on evidence, and evidence from day one is worth far more than a description written a week later.
Move what you can, leave what you can’t
Get light, valuable, and porous things out of the wet zone: rugs, electronics, documents, photo albums, anything under beds. Put foil or plastic under furniture legs you can’t move — furniture stain bleeding into wet carpet is a common, avoidable loss.
Don’t try to pull up carpet, cut drywall, or tear out flooring yourself. Which materials get removed depends on the water category and moisture readings, and removing the wrong things can complicate both the drying plan and the claim.
Don’t wait to see if it dries on its own
This is the most expensive mistake we see. In the Pacific Northwest, it mostly doesn’t. Our climate holds humidity for much of the year, and water that soaked into wall cavities, subfloor, and insulation won’t evaporate out of them — it sits there while mold gets started. A floor that feels dry on the surface can be wet underneath for weeks.
Professional drying isn’t fans. It’s sealed-off areas, industrial dehumidifiers, air movers positioned off moisture readings, and daily measurement until the structure meets the drying standards set by the IICRC, the certifying body for the restoration industry. Most water damage drying takes three to seven days. If mold does get ahead of the water, that becomes a mold remediation job — larger, slower, and harder on everyone.
Call your insurance — and a restoration company
You don’t have to have your policy figured out before you call for help. Sudden and accidental water damage — burst pipes, appliance failures, ceiling leaks — is typically covered by standard homeowners insurance. We document the damage, submit to your carrier within 24 hours, and bill the carrier directly. In most covered claims, your out-of-pocket is your deductible.
If you want the deeper version, we wrote a full guide to how water damage coverage works in Washington and Oregon.
The short version
Stop the water. Kill power to wet areas if it’s safe. Photograph everything. Move what’s light and valuable. Stay out of sewage. And don’t wait for it to dry on its own, because in Vancouver it won’t.
If you’re standing in a wet room right now, call TIK Construction at (360) 938-4601. A real person answers 24/7 — day or night, every day of the year — and we’ll tell you exactly what to do next.