Flooded Water Damage
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Our personal water damage story

My wife Lynsey and I live in Sacramento and bought our first home in 2003. One Friday morning Lynsey left for work while I was washing down the front of my car with a shammy leather cloth, realizing how late it was I ran back through the garage and threw the cloth into the laundry sink and turned on the faucets to rinse out the soap. I hurried through to the bedroom to pick up my gym bag and ran out the front door completely forgetting about the water quickly filling up the laundry sink.

When we returned around 10PM that evening after a nice dinner out, we couldn't believe our eyes as we opened the garage door and saw water pouring out form the laundry room flooding the garage. The faucet had been running since 8AM that morning and the entire house from corner to corner was under 2 inches of water. In a state of panic we turned off the faucet and jumped on the phone to call our insurance company who told us to look through the yellow pages for a remediation company. We found several, called them and only one picked up the phone. One guy (by himself) came out pretty quickly and proceeded to rip off baseboards (without scoring them with a blade) which tore the paint on every wall. He then detached every carpet from the tack strip and put a fan under each section (called floating the carpet) and pretty much made a big mess.

Looking back a few weeks later there were a few things that disturbed me about our whole ordeal:

  • My insurance company, in our hour of need, didn't have a preferred restoration company that they trusted enough to refer us to.
  • Most of the restoration companies we called from the yellow pages didn't even pick up their phones at 11PM.
  • The company that did show up (not naming any names, although I think they're out of business now) only had one technician even though I had explained over the phone that the entire house was involved.
  • There was so much work to do that he rushed and didn't take the care that I would have expected him to take. Seriously, a bull in our red room would have been more careful.
  • The method of drying was very destructive for the amount of time the water was there (I leant this later that since it was a clean water loss he could have dried everything in place with the right equipment, but he tore most things out because he knew his company would be doing the build-back too).
Well, a few months later, my wife and I decided to open up our own restoration company called PuroClean Home Rescue (part of a Nation-wide franchise over 300 offices strong) and after many months of training, including with the IICRC (The Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification) we were ready to provide the right service to other home and business owners who face similar situations. We have been in the business for quite a while now and have seen it all, every job is different and it all adds to the experience and knowledgebase, but nothing gave us more experience than living through a large scale water loss ourselves.

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