Almost every expensive water loss we are called to had a cheaper version of itself about four hours earlier. What happens in that window is mostly decided by whether somebody knew the order to do things in.
Here is the order. It takes about an hour and none of it requires a contractor.
1. Stop the water
If the source is inside the building — a pipe, an appliance, a water heater, a supply line — shut it off at the main. In most houses in Collingwood that is on the wall where the service enters, usually in the basement on the street side, with the meter beside it.
If you cannot find it, that is a two-minute phone call and it is the only part of this page worth interrupting yourself for. If the source is outside the building — a river, a storm, a melt — there is nothing to shut off and you move to step two.
2. Kill the power to the affected area
At the panel, not at the switch. A ceiling light fitting that has taken water holds it inside the housing and gives no sign of it from below, and a recessed fitting is the worst offender. Water on a floor with outlets near it is the same problem at ankle height.
If the panel itself is in the wet area, or the water is near the service entrance, do not go in. Stand outside the room and call somebody. This is the one paragraph on this site where the right answer is to do nothing at all.
3. Photograph before you tidy
Ten photographs, in this order:
- The entry route. A drain, a doorway, a crack at the slab-wall joint, a stain on a ceiling. This one decides your insurance position and it cannot be recreated afterwards.
- The extent of the water, from two corners of the room.
- The source, if you have found it.
- Anything valuable that is sitting in it.
- The reading on the water meter if you suspect a hidden supply leak.
Note the time and date. On an insurance question, “sudden” and “gradual” are the words that matter most, and a dated photograph of a wet floor is the best evidence either way. Whether to claim water damage on your insurance explains why that distinction is worth more than the volume of water.
4. Do not enter it if the water came up
Water that came back up through a floor drain, a toilet or a laundry standpipe is sewage, whatever it looks like. Close the door, keep children and pets out, and stop. That is sewer backup, it is Category 3 water under the S500 framework, and the porous material that touched it is not going to be saved by anything you do in the next hour.
The same applies, less obviously, to water that arrived over the ground from outside. It has crossed roads, yards and farmland, and it is handled as contaminated for that reason alone.
5. Lift, do not carry
For clean water, lift what you can off the wet floor rather than hauling it out of the house. Put furniture legs on blocks or foil. Get rugs, cardboard boxes and anything with a fabric base off the floor first, because those three do the most secondary damage: dye transfers into carpet and flooring, and cardboard wicks water upward into whatever is stacked on top of it.
Take up loose floor coverings if you can do it safely. Leave fitted flooring alone — pulling laminate or engineered board is a job that has to be done in an order, and doing it wrong turns a repairable floor into a replaced one.
6. Get air moving, but do not close the building up
Open interior doors and closet doors in the affected area so the air can reach the assemblies. Run fans if you have them. If the outside air is cold and dry — which in this region it usually is between December and March — ventilating helps. If it is warm and humid, or cold and saturated, opening windows makes it worse, and a dehumidifier is the only thing doing useful work.
That is the point where household equipment stops being enough. Air movers evaporate moisture off surfaces and dehumidifiers remove what they put into the room, and the ratio between them is most of the skill in structural drying.
7. Do not close anything back up
The most expensive mistake available in the days after a loss is putting the room back together while the assembly behind it is still wet. Drywall over a wet batt, flooring over a wet subfloor, trim over a wet bottom plate — all three look finished, and all three come back the following summer as a smell, a stain, or a mould remediation.
The room is finished when the affected materials match the same materials elsewhere in your building that never got wet, and somebody has written that down. How to tell when a building is actually dry covers what that looks like on paper.
If the building was empty when it happened
Everything above assumes you were standing there. A great deal of the work in The Blue Mountains, Wasaga Beach and along the escarpment is not like that: an ordinary failure in a building nobody entered for a fortnight.
In that case the first hour is not about stopping water. It is about not making assumptions — the water is long gone, the materials in contact with it have probably failed rather than merely got wet, and the useful first step is establishing the boundary of the affected area rather than starting to dry the middle of it.