What You Should Know About Water Damage Restoration

If a flood occurs close to your home, you might get out in time. You can shelter with a family member or possibly at a facility that your city or township has set up for the purpose. Hopefully, you won’t have a very unpleasant experience while you’re waiting for the flood waters to lower and eventually dissipate.

Once they have, though, you face a long process to return to normalcy. You’ll need to look into water damage restoration services. We will discuss that concept in detail right now.

What Does Water Damage Entail?

Water damage can happen when a dam breaks, or it might occur if it rains for many days and nights and a lake or river close by swells and overruns its banks. You may also have a situation where you don’t have the proper drainage system set up in your house, and rainfall overwhelms your drainage resources.

Maybe you’ll have a whole city or neighborhood affected. You might also have an unlucky street or a few houses that dealt with water damage. Either way, if you have water damage that impacted your home, vehicle, or anything else you own, you must figure out what you’ll do next.

Look At Your Insurance Policy

If you have water that damaged your house, vehicle, or other property, you’ll probably spend the following days looking over your insurance policies. Assuming you had some, you might have explicit statements in there that say the company covers you if flooding or other water damage occurs. Just as often, though, you will have companies that don’t cover water damage.

If you have a clause in the policy that states that the company covers you if flooding or other water damage occurs, then you can contact them. You must find out when they can send help and exactly what that entails.

If you have no policy, or your policy does not cover water damage, you must look into other options. You can’t live in a water-damaged house or drive a water-damaged vehicle.

Restoration Companies

Your insurance provider might hire a restoration company that will come and help you. If you don’t have insurance, or your insurance policy did not cover flooding or other water damage, then you’ll likely hire one of these companies on your own.

These companies exist to help individuals or families that have experienced water damage, and often, other kinds of damage as well. They might help you after a fire, an earthquake, a tornado, etc.

They will come in and assess the damage, and then they’ll come up with a plan for fixing the problem. 

That likely starts when they remove anything from the property that you can’t save. If you had a serious flooding situation with the whole house submerged, or most of it, they probably can’t save much.

If the flooding didn’t envelop the entire house, you might not have damage on the upper floors. If that’s true, you can count your blessings.

The restoration company can look into how much damage the carpets sustained, as well as the furniture, any heirlooms, the electrical system, etc. They can estimate how much money you’ll pay for the cleanup and also the refurbishing process that must come afterward.

What About Total Destruction?

If water completely destroyed your home, perhaps even the best restoration company can’t do much. They can clean out the home’s interior, but maybe they’ll tell you that you should demolish what’s left and build it over from scratch. You won’t like hearing that, but these situations happen sometimes. It’s tragic, but you must face facts.

In that situation, if you have insurance, they might cut you a check, and you must find some other place you can live. You may seek another city or state entirely. Perhaps you feel if there are continual flood or water damage risks, you should pull up stakes and try living somewhere else.

Whether you hire them independently or an insurance company hires them on your behalf, a restoration company can help give you an honest assessment when you need one. They will sympathize with your situation, but they will also tell you frankly whether you can save the house or part of it, or whether you should demolish what’s left and start from scratch.

These restoration companies can assist you when you need it, just like a lawyer when you need legal help. You’ll feel glad they’re there for you during this difficult time.