What To Do First: Water Emergency Checklists

Water on the floor: the first fifteen minutes

Kill the source. On city water the shutoff is the meter box out by the street or the main valve where the line comes into the house, turned clockwise. On a well — which is most of the western and southern county — the fastest stop is the breaker feeding the pump, and knowing that in advance is worth a lot of gallons.

Deal with electricity before you walk anywhere. If there is water near outlets, a washer, the water heater or the panel itself, drop the breakers for that area while standing on something dry. If getting to the panel means walking through the water, do not: that call goes to an electrician or the power company. This is the one line on the page with no exception attached.

Photograph all of it before you move anything, the ceiling below included if the water came from upstairs. Then get what you can up off the floor, and slide foil or wood scraps under the legs of anything left standing so finishes do not stain down into carpet.

Leave the shop vacuum alone, and leave the fan off in any room where the ceiling is holding water. Then call, because the window is short: wet material here starts growing mold somewhere between a day and two days in, and from May through September it is the early end of that.

A storm has opened the roof

Stay off the roof, particularly in the dark and particularly while it is still wet. Pictures from the ground and out of an upstairs window are enough to begin with, and a phone on a pole or a drone flight in daylight shows more than a person standing on wet shingles ever will.

Move what sits under the leak, get containers under the active drips, then look at the ceiling itself. One that is sagging or carrying a visible bulge is carrying weight. Clear the room. If it has to be relieved, that means a small hole made deliberately from the edge of the wet area by somebody standing clear of it, not a bucket held up underneath.

Cover the building the same day. Tarping counts as emergency mitigation, your policy expects it, and once a line of storms has crossed the county every crew and every roofer is working through the calls in the order they arrived. On those days calling early beats anything else you can do.

Opening a house that has been shut up

Student rentals stand empty from May into August, and a weekend place north of town toward Lake Tuscaloosa can sit for a month at a time. Before the car is unloaded, walk it: open the cabinet under each sink, look at the water heater and its pan, check the hoses at the washer, put a light behind the refrigerator, and lift the crawl space door if the house has one. Nearly every large loss of this kind began as a small failure that simply ran with nobody there.

Rural property on a well and septic gets no early warning at all. No meter, no bill, nothing to spike — a running line announces itself as a soft floor or an odor and nothing sooner. In a manufactured home, walk the whole width and feel for give: water past the belly wrap has nowhere to drain and sits under the decking, reaching the room last.

Water on the floor means switching nothing on. Shut the supply, then make the call. And when you close a place up for the season, turn the main off before you lock the door. Half a minute there removes the most common way these buildings get lost.

Situations that are 911 calls, not restoration calls

Live electrical equipment in contact with water where the power cannot be cut from dry ground.

Gas, in any amount anybody can smell.

A floor, wall or ceiling that has dropped, cracked or moved.

Anyone injured, and anyone in a building you have doubts about standing in.

Moving water across a road. Flooding here comes up fast off Hurricane Creek, Cottondale Creek and Cribbs Mill Creek, and a covered road at night is not a judgment worth making from behind the wheel.