Water Damage in Your Home: What to Do in the First 24 Hours

Water moves fast, and so does the clock. In the first 24 hours a leak is usually a cleanup; by day three, with Georgia humidity, it is often a mold job and a rebuild. This is the order of operations we would follow in our own homes.

First 10 minutes: stop the water and make it safe

1. Find the source and shut it off. For a burst pipe, failed supply line or water heater, close the main shut-off. In most metro Atlanta homes it is where the line enters the house — a basement or crawl-space wall, the garage, or a closet near the water heater. If you cannot find it, the meter box at the street has a valve a wrench can close.
2. Cut the power to wet rooms. If water is anywhere near outlets, appliances or the panel, switch off the breakers for those rooms. If the panel itself is wet or you would have to stand in water to reach it, stop — call Georgia Power or an electrician and stay out.
3. Ask where the water came from. Clean supply water is one thing. Water from a toilet overflow, sewer backup, floodwater from a creek, or a washing machine drain is another. If it is anything but clean supply water, keep people and pets out of it. Here is how the three categories work.
4. Look up. A sagging, bubbled or dripping ceiling is holding water. Do not stand under it and do not poke it. Put a bucket under the lowest point and let a professional relieve it.

First hour: document before you touch anything

This is the step everyone skips and everyone regrets. Your claim is only as strong as your record of what the damage looked like before cleanup started.

• Video first, then photos. Walk every affected room slowly with your phone, narrating what you see and the time. Then take still photos of each wall, floor, ceiling and item.
• Photograph the source. The split pipe, the failed hose, the cracked toilet tank. Keep the broken part — do not let a plumber take it away. Adjusters want to see it.
• Show the water line. A photo of the high-water mark on the wall or a ruler standing in the water tells the story.
• List damaged contents with photos and, if you have them, receipts. Rugs, furniture, electronics, books, documents.
• Start a log. Date, time, who you called, what they said. It takes a minute and settles arguments months later.

Call your insurance company today

Most Georgia homeowners policies require you to give prompt notice of a loss and to take reasonable steps to protect the property from further damage. Both start now. When you call, ask three things: your claim number, whether your policy covers emergency mitigation (most do, separately from repairs), and whether they want you to wait for an inspection before anything is removed. Write the answers in your log.

Insurers in Georgia have deadlines too. State rules require them to acknowledge your claim within 15 days, and to accept or deny it within a set window after you submit proof of loss. We cover the whole claim process in Does Homeowners Insurance Cover Water Damage in Georgia?

Hours 2–12: move, lift and start airflow

• Move furniture, boxes and electronics off wet floors to a dry room or the garage. Put foil or plastic under the legs of anything too heavy to move.
• Pull up wet rugs and take them outside. A wet rug on a hardwood floor will stain it within a day.
• Open cabinet doors and drawers under a sink or dishwasher leak. Water pools under the cabinet base, where you cannot see it.
• If the water is clean and shallow, mop, wet-vac or towel up what you can. Standing water is the enemy; every hour it sits, it wicks higher into drywall and deeper into subfloor.
• Run the air conditioning. In Georgia, your AC is your first dehumidifier. Set it to 72°F or lower and keep windows closed on humid days — opening them usually adds moisture.
• Point fans across (not at) wet surfaces to keep air moving.

What household fans and a wet-vac cannot do is dry the inside of a wall, the subfloor under a floating floor, or the insulation behind a baseboard. That is where professional equipment comes in — moisture meters to find where the water went, air movers and commercial dehumidifiers to pull it out, and daily readings to prove it is gone. Our drying and dehumidification page explains what that looks like day by day.

Hours 12–24: decide what stays and what goes

Some materials dry and recover. Some never do, and keeping them is how a water loss becomes a mold loss.

If you are not sure, leave it and let the restoration crew make the call with a moisture meter. Throwing out a sofa that could have been cleaned costs you; keeping a mattress that sat in gray water costs you more.

Day 2 onward: what the next week looks like

A typical clean-water loss in a metro Atlanta home dries in three to five days with professional equipment, longer for hardwood and plaster. Expect daily visits to take moisture readings and adjust the equipment, then a final set of readings that shows every material is back to its normal dry standard. Those readings go into the claim file. After that comes the rebuild — new drywall, paint, flooring — which is a separate phase and often a separate line on the claim. Our reconstruction team handles that so you are not coordinating three contractors.

What not to do

• Do not run the heat to dry things faster. Warm, wet and still is the recipe for mold. Cool, dry and moving is the goal.
• Do not use a household vacuum on wet carpet. Wet-vac or nothing.
• Do not throw damaged items away until they are photographed and your insurer has said it is fine to dispose of them.
• Do not spray bleach on drywall or wood. It does not reach mold roots in porous material and the moisture feeds what is left.
• Do not sign a contract with the first truck that shows up unless you called them. Ask who they are, whether they are the company you called, and what the paperwork says before you sign.

Frequently asked questions