Hour one is about the source: main shutoff or appliance valve, power off to wet rooms if water is near outlets, and phone photos of everything before it moves. Insurers and adjusters work from documentation, and the first hour is when the documentation is honest.
In Sterling, the first day is spent in the basement, because that is where this community keeps its living space. Photograph the entry or the burst, close the shutoff on anything running, and say the source out loud before equipment arrives. Check the sump pit early: a pit at its rim during a storm reframes the whole job from a room cleanup to a systems failure, and that sentence belongs in the first call. Keep the household out of any room a sewage fixture has claimed, and let the extraction crew's readings, not the carpet's feel, write the first scope.
Hours two to six are extraction territory. Standing water does not wait politely: it wicks up drywall roughly an inch an hour at first and runs under flooring along the subfloor. A shop vac handles a spill; a room of water needs truck-mounted or portable extraction and then real drying equipment, not a box fan.
By hour twenty-four the question changes from 'is it wet' to 'what is still wet.' Moisture meters, not fingertips, answer that. If a contractor cannot show you readings, the drying is a guess - and guesses are how mold shows up in month two.
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