Heavy rain is putting water in the house. What to do, and what it will cost you.

Keep out of any standing water that has reached outlets, appliances, or a breaker panel, then get water moving away from the building outside: clear the downspout, clear the drain at the bottom of the steps, and pull anything blocking the path water is taking. Inside, lift what you can off the floor and photograph where the water is entering before anything moves.

This is one of the few situations on this site where closing the main valve does nothing. The water is not coming from your plumbing, so there is no valve to turn.

Outside is where you can actually change the outcome

While the rain is still falling, the useful work is outside, and it is unglamorous:

• Downspouts. Check each one is attached and discharging, and that the water is running away from the house rather than into the ground next to it. A disconnected downspout puts hundreds of gallons against the foundation.
• Gutters. An overflowing gutter is a downspout that is not working.
• The drain at the bottom of an exterior stairwell or window well. These block with leaves and then the well fills like a bucket and pushes water through the window.
• The grade next to the house. If the ground slopes toward the wall, the water has been told where to go. A temporary furrow or a bag of soil can redirect it for tonight.
• Anything damming the flow: firewood stacks, planters, a tarp, a pile of leaves against a wall.

None of this is a repair. It is buying hours, which is often all that is needed to get through one storm.

Inside, work in this order

1. Get people and pets out of the wet area, and out of the lowest floor entirely if water is still rising.
2. Lift what you can: boxes (cardboard is the first casualty), electronics, documents, anything on the floor of a storage area.
3. Put furniture legs on blocks or foil to break contact with a wet floor.
4. Get standing water out if it is safe to do so, with a wet vacuum or a utility pump discharging outside and away from the house.
5. Photograph and video everything, including where the water is coming in and how high it reached. Mark the high water line on a wall with tape or a pencil.

If you have a sump and it is not keeping up or not running, that is its own problem with its own answers.

This is not only a basement problem

A house on a slab does not escape this. Rain water arrives at a slab house through the door threshold, through the gap where the slab meets the wall framing, up through cracks in the slab when the ground is saturated, and through a garage that sits lower than the house. In a heavy storm it can come in at the front door faster than it comes up anywhere else.

The response is the same. Move water away from the building outside, get it off the floor inside, and treat what soaked into the wall base and the flooring as the actual damage.

The same is true in a crawl space, with one addition: water sitting in a crawl space under a house does not drain, does not dry, and puts moisture into the floor above it for months. It needs pumping out, not leaving to soak away.

Then treat the water as dirty

Water that has run across the ground, through a yard, along a road, or up through a floor drain is not clean, whatever it looks like. It has picked up whatever was on the ground, and if any of it came back up out of a drain, it is a sewage problem and a health problem.

Practically that means carpet and pad that sat in it come out rather than get dried, drywall gets cut above the water line, and you do not run a fan across it before it has been cleaned.

The insurance part, and it is the part people get wrong

Standard homeowners policies in the US exclude flood. The word does not mean what most people assume: it generally covers surface water, rising water, groundwater, and water that enters at or below ground level, whether or not anyone would call it a flood. Water pushing through a basement wall after a storm is excluded under most policies. So is water coming up through a slab. So is water running in under a door.

Flood is covered by a separate policy, either through the National Flood Insurance Program or a private flood insurer, and those policies typically have a waiting period before they take effect, so it is not something you can buy during a storm.

Two other exclusions catch people in the same event:

• Water backing up through a sewer or a drain, or overflowing from a sump, is usually excluded as well, and needs its own endorsement. If your basement filled partly through the floor drain, that is the coverage that matters.
• Seepage over time, meaning a wall that has been letting water in for months, is excluded as maintenance in most policies regardless of the storm.

None of this means do not call your insurer. Call them, report it promptly, and let them make the coverage decision on the record. Late reporting is a separate reason to be denied, and there is often coverage for part of an event even where the water itself is excluded. Damage to a sump pump, or a furnace, or electrical equipment may be treated differently from the water damage to the building.

If the event was widespread, check whether a disaster declaration has been made for your county. That opens assistance which is separate from insurance, and it has deadlines.

Fixing it properly, later

Once it is dry, the real fix for repeat water is almost always outside rather than inside. In rough order of how much they help per dollar:

1. Downspouts extended well away from the foundation.
2. Gutters that actually flow. Check both after every storm.
3. Grading that slopes away from the house for the first several feet.
4. Window well covers and clear window well drains.
5. A working sump with a battery or water powered backup.
6. Interior or exterior drainage systems, which are real construction and cost accordingly.

Sealing the inside face of a basement wall is the one people try first and it is usually the least effective, because it treats the symptom on the dry side of the water.

The short version

Stay out of water near anything electrical. Do the outside work first, because that is where you can still change the outcome. Photograph the entry point and mark the high water line. Expect most homeowners policies to exclude water that arrives from the ground, report it anyway, and check whether you carry sump and sewer backup coverage.