There is sewage in the house. Is it safe to stay?

Shut the door on the affected area, keep everyone out of it, and stop using water anywhere in the building. Whether the house is safe to sleep in tonight comes down to three questions: how far the water spread, whether it reached the furnace or the air handler, and whether anyone living there is pregnant, elderly, very young, or immune compromised.

If the answer to the last one is yes, leave. That is not a cautious answer, it is the one the exposure risk actually justifies.

What you are dealing with

Water that has come back up out of a drain is what the restoration industry calls category three. It is not dirty water in the sense of muddy water. It carries bacteria, viruses, and parasites, and the standard response to it is removal of what it soaked into rather than drying it out.

The first moves, before anything else, are to stop using water and stay out of it. This page is the next question: whether the building is habitable while that gets sorted out.

The three questions, in order

How far did it spread? A backup confined to an unfinished basement floor with a drain, in a house where nobody sleeps downstairs, is a containable problem. A backup that reached carpet, that ran under a wall into the next room, or that came up on the floor people walk on barefoot is a different answer.

Did it reach the mechanical systems? Furnaces, air handlers, and water heaters usually sit at the lowest point of the building, which is exactly where a backup arrives. Ducts running in or under a slab fill and then blow. If any of that is wet, the whole house is affected regardless of where the water stopped.

Who lives there? Infants, anyone pregnant, anyone over about seventy, anyone on chemotherapy or immunosuppressants, anyone with a chronic respiratory condition. For those people the sensible threshold is much lower, and the answer to a contained basement backup is still to stay somewhere else until it is cleaned.

What usually makes it unsafe

• Sewage on a floor anyone walks on, especially where children play.
• The heating or cooling system contaminated, or ducts that took water.
• The only bathroom or the only kitchen out of use, which is a habitability question rather than a health one.
• A smell strong enough to be unpleasant throughout the building, which usually means either a large volume or poor ventilation.
• Water still arriving, because until it stops nothing can be cleaned.

What usually does not

• A small contained backup on a hard floor, cleaned within hours, in a room that can be shut off.
• A basement floor drain that overflowed and receded, where nothing porous was in the way.
• A backup in a garage or an outbuilding.

While you decide

• Close interior doors and put a towel along the bottom of the affected room’s door.
• Open a window in that room if the weather allows, and keep the door to the rest of the house shut. You want that air going outside rather than through the building.
• Do not run fans or a dehumidifier across contaminated water. Air movement over it moves what is in it around the house, which is a bigger problem than a wet floor.
• Take shoes off at the edge of the affected area rather than walking through the house in them.
• Wash hands properly, with soap, any time anyone has been near it. This is the single most effective thing in this list.
• Photograph everything from the doorway before anyone touches it.

If you leave

Keep every receipt. Most policies include additional living expenses when a home is genuinely uninhabitable, and a sewage backup is one of the clearer cases for it. Whether that cover applies at all depends on something specific: most policies exclude sewer and drain backup unless you bought the endorsement.

Call your insurer before you commit to a hotel, tell them the situation, and write down who you spoke to and when. Then go, and sort out the coverage argument from somewhere dry.

What to ask the contractor before work starts

Two questions, and the answers tell you whether they are working to the standard:

What category are you treating this water as? The answer should be three.

What are you removing rather than drying? There should be a removal list, not a drying plan. What comes out and what can stay is the part that decides both the bill and whether the house is actually clean.

If someone proposes to dry sewage water in place and save the carpet, get another opinion.

The short version

Shut the door on it and stop using water. Leave if it reached the heating system, if it is on a floor people live on, or if anyone in the house is immune compromised, pregnant, very young, or elderly. Do not run fans over it. Call the insurer before you book a hotel, and keep the receipts either way.