Extraction, drying and moisture records after a supply line lets go in a Dallas attic, wall or garage.
Fastest: call (833) 490-5225. Or send this and we call you back.
A burst supply line can put hundreds of gallons into a house before anyone finds the valve. Dallas Water Damage Restoration covers the cleanup side across Dallas and Dallas County: extraction, opening wet assemblies, structural drying and a moisture record for your claim. Phones are staffed around the clock, and a crew heads out as fast as one is available.
The first job is the valve, not the mop. Close the main shut-off, which in many Dallas-area homes sits in the meter box out at the curb and needs a meter key, and check whether your house also has a valve where the line comes in at the wall or in the garage. Learning which one you have on a calm afternoon is worth more than any advice given afterward.
A burst pipe in Dallas usually sits above you or beside you rather than beneath a basement ceiling. Supply lines run through vented attics on the way to upstairs baths and attic water heaters, down exterior walls, through unheated garage walls and out to hose bibs on brick veneer. When one of those lets go, water follows the ceiling joists, drops through light fixtures and vents, and ends up spread across a slab floor one or two rooms from the break.
Everything the water touched is restoration work; the pipe itself is not. Repairing or replacing the line is work for a Texas-licensed plumber, licensed through the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners. The crew handles extraction, cutting back what will not dry, drying the structure and recording what it found.
A half-inch supply line under normal household pressure moves several gallons a minute, so an unattended break is measured in hundreds of gallons. In a slab-on-grade house the water soaks ceilings and insulation on the way down, then spreads flat across the floor and climbs the drywall of every wall it reaches.
The damage is rarely limited to the room with the hole in the ceiling. Water tracks along the top plate of walls, runs down inside the cavity and comes out at the baseboard somewhere else entirely. Blown-in attic insulation that gets wet packs down and stops insulating, and that is the part homeowners most often forget to have checked.
Contents take the first hit. Cardboard boxes stored on a garage or closet floor, the bottom shelf of a built-in, the particleboard base of a kitchen cabinet and the underside of a sofa all absorb water quickly, which is why moving things up off the floor in the first hour makes a real difference.
In many Dallas-area houses the main shut-off is a valve inside the water meter box at the curb or in the front yard, and turning it takes a long-handled meter key rather than a hand. Some homes also have a valve where the supply line reaches the house or the garage wall.
Lift the meter box lid and you will usually see the meter plus a valve on the street side and sometimes one on the house side. Turn the house-side valve clockwise until it stops. If the lid is painted shut, the box is full of soil, or the valve will not budge, that is worth sorting out on a mild day, not during a freeze.
Keep a meter key where you can find it in the dark, and tell everyone in the house where it lives. North Texas plumbers spent the February 2021 freeze repeating the same advice, because a house with a known, working valve loses a fraction of the water that a house without one does.
Usually, when the break is sudden and accidental. The Texas Department of Insurance says most policies cover that kind of loss, a burst pipe included, while a line that seeped for months generally is not covered. Your insurer makes the call, so read the policy or ring your agent early.
Document before you tidy. Photograph the break, the wet ceilings and floors and the standing water, keep the piece of pipe your plumber removes, and write down when you found it and when the water was shut off. The crew can add daily moisture readings and a list of removed materials to that file for you.
Under Texas Insurance Code Chapter 707 the policyholder pays the deductible, and it is illegal for a contractor to offer to waive, rebate, absorb or credit it. A contract of $1,000 or more tied to an insurance settlement has to carry written notice of that, so treat an offer to cover your deductible as a warning sign rather than a bargain. The Texas water damage insurance guide covers the usual exclusions, and the Texas Department of Insurance takes consumer questions if a claim stalls.
A Texas-licensed plumber. Plumbing is licensed statewide under the Occupations Code and administered by the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, and repairing or replacing a supply line is plumbing work. The restoration crew can cap a line to get pressure back on sooner, but it does not make the permanent repair.
The two jobs run in parallel rather than one after the other. The crew starts extraction and drying while the plumber schedules the repair, which matters most after a freeze, when every plumber in Dallas County has a waiting list. Looking up a license on the board's website before you hire takes a minute.
If the broken line turns out to be polybutylene, which some houses from that late-1970s to mid-1990s building era may have, ask your plumber what the rest of the system looks like. A single repair on a system that may be at the end of its life is a short-term answer.
Because the weather that breaks one pipe breaks thousands. North Texas plumbing is built for heat, with supply lines in vented attics and uninsulated exterior walls, so a single hard freeze hits every house in a neighborhood at once and plumbers, crews and supply houses are all overloaded within hours of each other.
February 2021 is the benchmark. The storm ran from February 13 to 17, DFW fell to -2 degrees Fahrenheit on February 16, and the airport recorded roughly 295 consecutive hours of freezing temperatures, close to twelve days. About 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses lost power at the peak, and water systems across North Texas lost pressure.
Pipes that split in the cold often stay quiet until the thaw, which is why the flood of calls arrives days after the coldest night. Frozen pipe water damage covers that delay, and the North Texas freeze guide sets out what to do before the next one. Call (833) 490-5225 as soon as you find water, even if you cannot reach a plumber yet.
Keep away from water that has reached can lights, ceiling fans, outlets or a panel, and do not push on a bulging ceiling to drain it: wet drywall comes down in sheets and it is heavier than it looks. Leave the breaker alone unless the panel is dry and reachable, and get people and pets out of the room under a sagging ceiling.
The crew confirms the main valve is closed and checks whether water has reached wiring, can lights, a panel or an air-handler disconnect. Electrical equipment in the wet path is treated as live until it has been isolated, and an electrician is called in where one is needed.
A thermal camera and moisture meters follow water from the break through the attic insulation, down the wall cavity and out across the floor. That path matters more than the puddle, because a line that burst over a hallway can wet a bedroom closet two rooms away.
Water comes out of carpet, pad and hard floors with extraction units. Saturated ceiling drywall is usually taken down rather than dried, wet insulation is bagged out, and wall drywall is cut back two to four feet where readings show water wicked up into it.
Air movers and dehumidifiers run on the wet rooms and the cavities behind them, with readings taken daily against a dry reference wall in the same house. Equipment comes out when the wet materials match that reference, not when the surfaces feel dry.
Photos, daily readings and an itemized record of what was removed go to you, to pass on to your insurance company. Drywall, texture, paint and flooring work is priced after drying, and the plumber bills the pipe repair separately.
Copper, CPVC or PEX running above the insulation to a second-floor bath, an attic water heater or an ice maker. Attic bursts do the most damage per gallon because the water crosses ceilings, insulation and wall cavities on the way down. Ceiling water damage deals with the stained, sagging drywall this leaves behind.
The lines closest to outside air are the ones that split in a freeze. A cracked hose bib often leaks back into the wall it is mounted on rather than onto the lawn, and a line inside an uninsulated garage wall drains quietly onto the garage slab and under the wall into the house.
A split or separated joint beneath a slab-on-grade foundation gives no ceiling clue at all, just a warm floor, a running meter or damp flooring along one wall. It is a different detection job and a different repair, covered on the slab leak water damage page.
A burst-pipe bill tracks how long the water ran, how many rooms and ceilings it reached and what it soaked on the way. A line that let go while the house was empty for a weekend costs several times what the same line costs when somebody was home to close the valve.
| Job | Typical range | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency inspection and moisture assessment | Free–$200 (often credited if work goes ahead) | Includes tracing the wet path through attic and wall cavities |
| Standing water extraction (per sq ft) | $1.00–$3.50 | Carpet, tile and bare slab all extract at different rates |
| Category 1 (clean water) mitigation, one room or small area | $1,200–$4,000 | A supply line caught early, with clean water only |
| Structural drying for one room (3–5 days, equipment + monitoring) | $800–$2,500 | Equipment plus the daily moisture checks |
| Flood cut: remove wet drywall 2–4 ft up (per linear ft of wall) | $3–$8 | Includes bagging out the wet insulation behind it |
| Ceiling water damage repair (one section, incl. texture + paint) | $450–$1,800 | Quoted after drying; matching older texture takes longer than new work |
Estimates for Dallas County in 2026, not a price list, and they do not include the plumber's repair to the pipe. The emergency-stage figure is explained and agreed before a crew starts, and putting the house back is quoted after drying.
Tell us what's happening and we'll tell you honestly whether it's a quick fix, and what burst pipe water damage should cost.
February 2021 rewrote what Dallas homeowners think is possible. The storm ran February 13 to 17, 2021; DFW recorded -2 degrees Fahrenheit on February 16, the second-coldest reading in its history after -8 degrees on February 12, 1899, and about 295 consecutive hours below freezing. With power out for about 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses and water systems in North Texas losing pressure, houses sat cold for days and then leaked all at once when the thaw came.
The reason it hit so hard is in how houses here are built. Supply lines are routed through vented attics on their way to upstairs bathrooms and attic water heaters, hose bibs sit on brick veneer with no insulated covers, garage walls are often uninsulated, and irrigation backflow assemblies stand above grade in the front yard. None of that is a defect in a city whose January lows normally sit in the low 30s. It simply leaves very little margin on the rare night that stays below freezing for days.
Housing era changes which pipe fails. Pre-1950 pier-and-beam houses in Oak Cliff, East Dallas and Lakewood have exposed lines in a vented crawl space, where a burst drains under the floor and into the subfloor. Slab ranches built in the 1950s through the 1970s across Pleasant Grove, Garland, Richardson, Mesquite, Balch Springs, Northwest Dallas, Lake Highlands and older Irving have long attic runs and aging drain lines. Subdivisions from the 1970s to the 2000s in DeSoto, Red Bird, Lancaster, Duncanville and Sunnyvale may have polybutylene or PEX supply lines and upstairs laundry rooms that leak straight through a ceiling.
Cleanup and drying after a Dallas freeze splits attic, garage or hose-bib lines and the leak starts as the ice melts.
Stains, sags and soaked insulation from attic equipment, hail-worn roofs and upstairs bathrooms, traced, dried and refinished.
Pumping, extraction and same-visit drying setup for standing water in Dallas homes, apartments and businesses.
Extraction and drying after an attic, garage or closet tank lets go, while a licensed plumber handles the heater itself.
Not sure if you're covered? Check your ZIP code.
North Texas pipes burst because hard freezes are rare here and houses are built for heat: supply lines run through vented attics, garage walls and brick veneer.
Texas homeowners policies generally cover water damage that is sudden and accidental, such as a burst pipe, a toilet overflow or a broken washing-machine hose.
If the water only wet a hard floor and you got it up within minutes, maybe not. If it ran through a ceiling, into insulation, under cabinets or across carpet, the materials are still wet even though nothing is dripping, and that wet insulation and framing is what grows mold over the following weeks. A meter check answers it quickly.
Not usually. Drywall that held standing water above it, sagged or lost its texture bond normally comes down, while drywall that only got damp at the edges is often dried in place. The insulation above it is a separate question, because wet blown-in insulation packs down, holds water and is generally bagged out and replaced.
An average single room with a wet ceiling and two wet walls usually takes three to five days of equipment, and readings decide the end date. Attics add time because insulation, framing and the top plates of walls all hold moisture, and in summer the attic air itself is hot and humid before anything leaks.
The cleanup work is the same, though the volume is usually much larger because nothing stopped the water for hours or days. Insurers sometimes ask about heat settings and shut-offs when a house was vacant, so note when you left, what the thermostat was set to and when you got back, and tell your agent early.
Sometimes a single line can be capped so the rest of the house has pressure again, and that is a judgement call made on site. It is a temporary measure, not a repair, and the permanent fix still goes to a Texas-licensed plumber.
That is a plumber's call, not a restoration one, and it depends on the material, the age of the system and how many repairs it has already had. Ask the plumber what the rest of the runs look like, especially in the attic, and get the answer in writing before the drywall goes back.