What to Do Immediately After Water Damage in Your Redwood City Home

If water is moving through your home right now, stop reading after this section and do these three things.

Shut off the water. Your main valve is usually where the supply enters the house — often in the front garden near the street, in a garage, or in a utility closet. On a water heater failure, close the cold inlet valve on top of the tank instead. If a single fixture is the source and you can reach its supply stop, that is faster.

Cut the power to the affected area at the breaker panel. Never reach for a panel or an outlet while standing in water. If you cannot get to the panel dry, leave it and wait outside for a crew.

Then call for help. We answer 24/7 and can be at most Redwood City addresses within the hour, and we will give you instructions on the phone while the truck is already moving.

Water damage is not a fixed amount of damage. It grows, and it grows on a schedule.

In the first hour, water is mostly still sitting on surfaces where it can be extracted mechanically. Extraction is roughly hundreds of times more efficient than evaporation, so every gallon pulled out with a wand in hour one is a gallon your drying equipment does not have to convert into vapour over the following days.

By hour six, water has wicked up drywall, run along the top of the subfloor, and soaked into carpet pad and insulation. Now you are drying materials rather than removing water.

Somewhere between 24 and 48 hours, mold begins colonising damp organic material — drywall paper, wood framing, carpet backing, insulation. That single threshold is the difference between a mitigation job and a remediation job, and it is usually the difference between a straightforward insurance claim and a contested one.

This is the step people skip and later regret. Your insurance claim runs on the evidence you collect in the first hour, and once cleanup begins that evidence is gone.

A few local details change the odds here.

If your home is on a slab — which describes a large share of the housing built west of El Camino Real between 1945 and 1965 — a hidden supply leak can run under the concrete for weeks. Warm patches on the floor, an unexplained water bill increase and the sound of running water with everything off are the tells. Our page on burst pipe and slab leak repair covers the detection process.

If you are in Redwood Shores, Foster City or anywhere on bayfill, expect a longer drying schedule. The water table is high and slabs give up moisture slowly, so a three-day promise on those addresses is not credible.

And if the water came from outside the building — storm runoff, a creek, a backed-up drain — treat it as contaminated. That is Category 3, and porous materials it touched need removal rather than drying.

Open the claim promptly. Most California homeowners policies cover sudden and accidental water damage such as a burst supply line, a failed water heater or an appliance hose letting go. Gradual leaks and deferred maintenance are commonly excluded, and rising water from outside the building almost always requires separate flood insurance.

Emergency mitigation — extraction, drying, board-up, tarping — is generally covered as loss-limiting work, and you do not need to wait for an adjuster to visit before starting it. Policies require you to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage.

We bill carriers directly and provide the documentation adjusters ask for: photo record, daily moisture logs, equipment logs and an itemised estimate. If you want the fuller version, our guide to what water damage restoration costs in Redwood City explains how the numbers are built.