Emergency Plumbers near you

Find two shutoffs before you ever need them. The main valve where the service enters the house is usually in a basement, a utility closet, a garage, or on slab-built homes in warm states outside near the hose bib. The meter at the curb is the backup and normally needs a meter key. Individual fixtures have their own stops beneath the sink or behind the toilet, and those handle most smaller failures without taking the whole house offline. Label the main now, while you are calm and the floor is dry.

Electricity comes before everything else when water is standing. EPA's enforcement alert on sewage backing up into basements tells residents that if it is necessary to approach a contaminated area, the first step is to turn off the electricity, and to be alert for broken gas lines, flooded electrical circuits and submerged furnaces or appliances. If reaching the panel means wading, do not: CDC's guidance on re-entering a flooded home says that if you cannot turn off the main power from a dry location, call an electrician to do it.

Gas is the one hazard where leaving beats fixing. CDC's advice is blunt: if you smell gas or suspect a leak, turn off the main gas valve, open all windows and leave the house immediately. Make the call to the utility and to emergency services from outside or from a neighbor's house, and do not go back in to look for the source. No plumbing emergency is urgent enough to justify standing in a building that smells of gas.

A backup is either your problem or the municipality's, and which one decides who pays. EPA's enforcement alert explains that when backups result from conditions in the municipal sewer system, the municipality is responsible for cleaning up and preventing future backups, but where sewage backs up because of problems in the pipeline running from the private residence to the municipal system, it is usually the property owner who is responsible for the cleanup and the repair. The alert adds that the municipality can help determine the cause, and that a homeowner who suspects the public system should ask them to investigate. Many cities run a sewer maintenance or customer hotline around the clock for exactly this.

Treat what comes up as contaminated, because it is. EPA describes sewer overflows as carrying bacteria, viruses, protozoa, intestinal worms, and molds and fungi, capable of causing illness ranging from mild gastroenteritis to serious disease. CDC's floodwater guidance tells anyone who must enter contaminated water to wear rubber boots, rubber gloves and goggles, to wash hands afterward, and to keep open wounds out of it entirely, covering any clean wound with a waterproof bandage. Keep children and pets away from the affected area until it has been cleaned and disinfected.

Photograph everything before cleanup begins. EPA's alert recommends taking pictures of the basement and other affected areas for damage and insurance claims, and warns that many homeowner and renter policies do not cover sewage backups at all, with special coverage typically needed as a rider on the basic policy. Finding that out on the day of a backup is a bad day made worse, so it is worth reading your own policy before one happens.

Stopping the leak is the first half of the job and drying the building is the second. EPA's guidance on mold cleanup is direct about the sequence: fix plumbing leaks and other water problems as soon as possible, and dry all items completely. Water that soaks into wall cavities, subfloor and insulation keeps feeding mold growth long after the visible puddle is gone, which is why a plumber who has fixed the pipe has not necessarily finished the emergency.

EPA also draws a practical line on who should handle the cleanup. Its homeowner guidance covers moldy areas smaller than about ten square feet; where there has been a lot of water damage or mold growth covers more than ten square feet, EPA directs readers to its guide for schools and commercial buildings, which is the point at which most homeowners bring in a remediation contractor rather than doing it themselves. Sewage-contaminated material is a separate matter again: EPA's enforcement alert notes that removing damaged rugs, furniture and drywall is often the only viable option, because saturated materials can keep supporting organisms for months.

There is no national plumbing licence in the United States, and an emergency does not suspend whatever your state requires. Minnesota is a useful illustration of how tightly a state can draw it: the Department of Labor and Industry states that all individual plumbers in Minnesota must be licensed or registered with the agency, that businesses contracting with consumers to provide plumbing services must hold a plumbing contractor licence, that licensed plumbing contractors carry a surety bond and liability insurance, and that all plumbing work statewide must comply with the current Minnesota Plumbing Code. The state runs an online lookup so a homeowner can check a licence in a minute.

Other states organize this very differently, placing plumbing under a contractors' board, a health department or a labor department, and in some places the licence that actually matters is issued by the city or county. The habit worth building is the same everywhere: get the company name and licence number when they agree to come, check it against your own state's board, and keep the invoice. If a truck arrives at midnight and nobody can produce a licence number, that is information about the company, not about the hour.