Fast, professional water damage restoration and mold remediation for San Anselmo homes and businesses.
San Anselmo has flooded more times than most towns in California, and the people who live here already know it.
On New Year's Eve in 2005, more than four feet of water came down San Anselmo Avenue. It hit 140 businesses and 290 homes and did around $30 million in damage. That was not the first one either. The creek came over in 1925, in 1943, in 1955, and again in 1982, when a five foot river ran through downtown.
So when we get called here, we are usually not explaining to anyone why this matters. What we are actually doing is separating creek water from clean water, because they are not the same job. Anything that came out of the creek is contaminated, and the drywall and insulation it touched has to come out no matter how good it looks once it dries. A burst supply line under a sink is a different situation, and a lot more of it can be saved.
Getting that call right at the start is most of the work. Fairfax sits just upstream on the same creek and deals with the same thing.
We are not insurance agents and your policy is the only thing that actually decides this, so treat what follows as the general shape rather than an answer about your house. Standard homeowners policies typically cover sudden internal water, a supply line letting go, a water heater failing, that kind of thing. What they typically exclude is flood, meaning water that arrives from outside and rises, which is exactly what San Anselmo Creek does. Flood coverage is usually a separate policy through the federal program or a private equivalent. That distinction matters enormously in this town, and the time to find out which one you have is not the week after a storm. What we can do either way is document properly from the first hour, with photographs, moisture readings logged as we take them, and a written scope, so whichever carrier you are dealing with has something concrete to work from.
If you live near the creek there will be another one, and there are things worth doing between now and then. Some are structural and belong to other trades: drainage, grading, backflow prevention on the sewer line, and in some cases raising mechanical equipment off the crawl space floor so it survives what the house does not. What we can tell you is what we saw in your house this time and where the water actually went, which is information most people do not have until it has happened once. Keeping a crawl space dry between storms matters more than anything else on the list, because a crawl space that never fully dries is already growing mold before the next flood arrives. Downstream in Larkspur the same creek arrives later and dirtier.
