Water in the house

The first day after a Houston flood is ugly and simple. Water leaves or mold gets a head start. Heat and humidity here do the rest. You do not need a perfect plan. You need pumps, a wet/dry vac, fans that actually move air out, and a hard stop when the job is sewage, electrical, or bigger than your crew.

This is the DIY + "call them" hub. Restoration companies live on the providers page. Health and sewage live here because they decide whether you should even be in the room.

The sequence Houston crews and neighbors kept repeating after Harvey: people and pets first; power only from a dry location; photograph the waterline and contents; tell the insurer; then pull saturated porous stuff; then dry with real airflow and a dehumidifier. Do not close walls or run a wet HVAC because you are tired of looking at studs.

1. Photo and video every room, the water line, and serial numbers before you haul a sofa to the curb. Claims die on missing proof.
2. Kill power to wet rooms if you can do it from a dry panel. If you cannot, leave it and get an electrician.
3. Pull standing water with a pump or wet vac. Neighbors often share equipment on the same block. Label what you borrow.
4. Get wet drywall and soaked insulation out if the water was more than a splash. Closed wet walls in September in Houston is how you grow a problem you can smell from the driveway.
5. Run air movers to push wet air out. Box fans in a closed house just stir humidity. Dehumidifiers help once bulk water is gone.

Houstonians often report they kept carpet "to see if it dried" and spent the next month sick. Street flood is not clean. If it came in from the curb or the bayou, treat textiles as a loss unless a restoration shop can actually wash them.

• Sewage or black water across a living space.
• Water in the electrical panel, outlets, or HVAC closet.
• A slab home with water under the floor that you cannot reach.
• You or anyone in the house has asthma, is pregnant, is very young, or is older and already sick.
• The water line is above a couple of feet and you are one person with a shop vac.

Calling extraction is not failure. It is how you keep the house from becoming a rebuild. Read the stop-DIY piece before you spend another night ripping rock without a respirator.

Houston floodwater mixes bayou, street runoff, and often sewage. That is category 3 / black water in restoration language. Gloves, boots, eye protection, and an N95 or better while you demo. Cuts go dirty fast. Tetanus status matters. Poison Control can talk you through cleaner mix-ups. Do not mix bleach with ammonia or with the mystery bottles that floated out of the laundry room.

Kids should not sleep in a damp first-floor room "for one more night" if you can help it. Damp plus Houston heat is a respiratory stack. If the house smells like a swamp, that is data. CDC's flood cleanup page and EPA's mold page both say the same thing in plainer words: get wet materials out, wear a respirator, and keep kids and anyone with asthma away from the demo. UTHealth Houston published a Harvey-era cleanup FAQ that is still a useful checklist. Confirm it against today's CDC page before you treat a 2017 PDF as the last word.

Bleach is not a cure for a wet wall cavity. If you get a headache or your chest tightens, leave the room. That is not toughness. That is the contaminant doing what floodwater does.