House Flooded? What to Do in the First 24 Hours

House flooded? What to do in the first 10 minutes

Nothing else you do matters while water is still coming in. If your house flooded in the last hour, this is the only list that counts. Work through it in order. Do not stop to clean anything yet.

1. Shut the water off at the source. If a supply line, toilet, or fixture failed, there is usually a small oval or quarter-turn valve right behind or under it. Close that first. If you cannot find it or it will not budge, go to the whole-house shutoff. In most Florida slab-on-grade homes that valve sits on an exterior wall near the front of the house, often near the hose bib, or in the garage. On an older house raised on piers or a crawl space it is more often inside, low on a wall or in a utility closet. The water meter box at the curb is your backup; the utility shutoff is inside it.
2. Water heater? Close the cold-water inlet valve on top of the tank and switch the heater off at the breaker, or turn a gas unit to "pilot." A leaking tank keeps refilling itself and keeps leaking until you close that valve. Water heaters last about 8 to 12 years on average, and the average one that fails is around 10 to 11 years old. If yours is in that range, this is a likely culprit.
3. Air conditioner? Turn the system off at the thermostat and at the breaker. A Florida air handler can pull 20 gallons or more of condensate out of the air on a humid day. As long as it runs, it keeps making the water that is dripping through your ceiling.
4. Cut power to the wet area. Only from a dry standing position, as above.
5. Get people and pets out of the wet rooms. Bare feet on a wet floor near live wiring is how a bad night becomes an emergency room visit.
6. Note the time. Write down when you first saw water and when you think it started. Two clocks are now running: the mold clock, and whatever notice deadline your own homeowners policy sets.

First hour: get it moving, get it on camera

The water has stopped. Now the goal is to pull it out of the building faster than the building can absorb it. Wear rubber boots and gloves. If the water is anything other than clean tap water, add eye protection and keep your hands away from your face.

7. Photograph and film before you move anything. Thirty seconds now prevents an argument later. Details are in the documentation section below.
8. Pull the standing water out. A wet/dry shop vacuum is the best household tool, a squeegee pushing water toward a door or a floor drain is second best, and a mop and bucket is a distant third that still beats standing there waiting for somebody with a truck mount to arrive. Never use your household vacuum on water.
9. Lift everything off the floor. Furniture legs go up on blocks, plastic risers, or folded aluminum foil. Wood stain and metal rust transfer into carpet and flooring within hours. Get books, cardboard boxes, electronics, and anything with a paper or fabric bottom onto a counter or into a dry room.
10. Take rugs off wood, laminate, and carpet and move them outside or into a dry room. A wet rug on wet flooring is a mold sandwich.
11. Open the building up. Interior doors, closet doors, cabinet doors, vanity doors, drawers pulled out. The air has to reach the cavities, not just the room.
12. Drop the humidity. If your air conditioning is not the source of the leak and it is safe to run, turn it on and set it low. An AC is a dehumidifier that also happens to cool. Add every fan and dehumidifier you own. In a Florida summer, opening the windows usually makes it worse: you are inviting in outdoor air that is already near saturation. In August the air outside is wetter than the air in your living room, which is why the window that feels like relief is actually a supply line feeding the moisture you are trying to pull out of the walls. In February, not so much. Same spill, different job, depending on the month.
13. Call a licensed restoration contractor. Tell them four things: where the water came from, how deep it got, how long it has been sitting, and how many rooms are affected. Ask whether the technicians coming to your home hold IICRC certification. A serious Florida company answers that question in one sentence.
14. Report the loss. Most homeowners policies require prompt notice of a loss. Your policy sets that deadline, not this website. Read your declarations page, or call the number printed on it. We are not licensed to advise you on coverage or on how to present a claim. Report what happened, factually, and ask your carrier or your own licensed agent what they need next.

First 24 hours: dry it out, keep records

This is the window that decides whether you have a drying job or a rebuild. Materials that stay wet past roughly 48 hours tend to stop being dryable and start being removable, and in a flooded house in Florida the ambient humidity is working against you the whole time, indoors and out, awake and asleep. Plan around 24. Treat 48 as the wall.

15. Keep air moving across wet surfaces, not just around the room. Aim fans along floors and walls at a low angle rather than straight down.
16. Do not close the house back up at bedtime. Drying stops the moment airflow stops, and eight quiet overnight hours is a third of your window.
17. Keep the failed part. The split supply hose, the corroded fitting, the cracked drain pan: bag it, label it with the date, and put it in the garage. Once it is in a dumpster it no longer exists.
18. Start a log. One line per entry: date, time, who called or came, what they said, what they did. Keep every receipt: fans, dehumidifiers, a plumber, towels, a hotel night.
19. Look for water you cannot see. Wet drywall wicks upward, so a wall that looks dry at eye level can be soaked to 18 inches. Check under laminate seams, behind baseboards, inside base cabinets, and at the sub-floor in doorways. Bubbling paint, a musty smell, or a soft spot underfoot means water is still in there. On a slab there is nowhere below the floor for water to drain to, so it spreads sideways and takes the seams: under tile, under toe kicks, into the bottom plate of every wall it reaches.
20. Make the flooring decision early. Carpet pad is a sponge and is almost always replaced. Solid wood and laminate that has swollen at the seams rarely comes back. Tile over a concrete slab usually survives the water itself, but the slab underneath can hold moisture for weeks afterwards and keep feeding it back into the room, which is why a house can look and feel fine in March and still smell like a closed-up boat in June.
21. Do not run the HVAC on a contaminated loss. If sewage or outdoor floodwater is involved, running the ducts distributes the problem into rooms that were never wet.

How dirty is the water? Categories 1, 2 and 3

Restoration professionals classify water using the IICRC S500 standard, and the category drives everything: what can be dried and kept, what has to be thrown away, what protective equipment the crew wears, and what the job costs. Knowing the vocabulary lets you follow the conversation instead of nodding along.

Categories degrade with time. Clean water sitting in a warm Florida house picks up soil, bacteria, and building contaminants and can be reclassified as Category 2 within a day or two. That is the strongest financial argument for calling someone at hour one rather than hour thirty: the same job gets more expensive by sitting still. Published 2026 cost data puts most Florida water damage restoration work between roughly $1,300 and $5,600. The mitigation portion, meaning extraction and drying, is typically only 30% to 40% of the total once rebuild is added.

What to photograph and write down

You are not building a legal case. You are making sure that in three weeks, when the wet drywall is gone and the floor is bare, there is still a record of what your house looked like the night it happened. Do this before you clean.

• A wide shot of every affected room from the doorway, so the extent is obvious at a glance.
• Water depth against something fixed: a door frame, a cabinet toe kick, a baseboard. A tape measure in the frame is better still.
• Close-ups of the damage: soaked carpet, swollen laminate seams, stained ceiling, wet insulation, ruined contents.
• The part that failed, in place, before anyone removes it.
• A slow video walkthrough in which you say out loud what room you are in, what you are seeing, and the date and time.
• Serial numbers and model plates on damaged appliances and equipment.
• Every piece of paper a contractor hands you. Photograph it before you sign it.

Seven things not to do

1. Do not walk into standing water to reach the breaker panel. This is the mistake that hurts people.
2. Do not use a household vacuum on water. Wet/dry vacuum or nothing.
3. Do not throw anything away before it is photographed, including the part that failed.
4. Do not open the windows in a Florida summer to "air it out." Outdoor air here carries more moisture than the air already inside. Use the AC and dehumidifiers instead.
5. Do not paint, seal, or cover wet drywall. Trapping moisture behind a coating turns a drying job into a demolition job.
6. Do not sign anything you have not read, especially a document titled "assignment," "direction to pay," or "work authorization." Florida law changed here: for residential property policies issued on or after January 1, 2023, assignment of post-loss insurance benefits is prohibited and any attempt to assign is void. If a document confuses you, that is a reason to slow down, not to sign faster.
7. Do not let demolition start before the damage is documented and the scope is in writing, including how many days of drying equipment you are agreeing to pay for.

What a restoration crew actually does

Knowing the sequence makes it obvious when someone is skipping steps.

1. Inspect and measure. Moisture meters on flooring and walls, a thermal camera to find water behind surfaces, and humidity and temperature readings taken both in the wet rooms and in a room that stayed dry, because a moisture reading only means something when there is an unaffected baseline to compare it against. They should map how far the water traveled. It is almost always farther than it looks.
2. Classify the water using the categories above, and tell you which one you have and why.
3. Extract remaining standing and trapped water with truck-mounted or portable equipment.
4. Remove what cannot be saved: carpet pad, wet insulation, saturated drywall cut back to a clean line, base cabinet kick panels. On a Category 3 loss, containment goes up first.
5. Set drying equipment: air movers positioned to sweep surfaces, and dehumidifiers sized to the volume of the space. Wall cavities may be vented from behind the baseboard line.
6. Monitor daily and record readings, moving equipment as materials release moisture.
7. Verify dry against a documented target, then pull equipment and hand you the drying log.

Two things you should get in writing at the end: the daily moisture readings, and a clear statement of what was removed. And if mold is found on an affected area larger than 10 square feet, Florida requires a separately licensed mold remediator. That is a different license from the drying work, issued by the Department of Business and Professional Regulation. A company that shrugs at that question is telling you something.

Questions people ask at 2 a.m.

---

Keep reading

• How long until mold grows after water damage?. The 24 to 48 hour window, explained.
• How to choose a water damage restoration company. What IICRC means, and the red flags worth walking away from.
• AC drain line leaks. Florida's most common everyday water damage source.
• All water damage guides