TL;DR: For a burst pipe, shut off your home’s main water valve immediately, then call a licensed plumber to stop the leak and a water damage restoration company to start extraction and drying. Both calls matter: the plumber fixes the pipe, but drying has to start within hours or Bakersfield’s heat and humidity swings turn a plumbing repair into a mold problem.
If water is actively spraying or pooling in your Bakersfield home right now, from Oleander to Riverlakes Ranch, you don’t have time for a long article. Bakersfield’s slab-on-grade construction and notoriously hard water mean supply lines corrode from the inside and fail without warning, often at a slab joint you can’t even see. Here’s exactly what to do, in order.
What should you do in the first 60 seconds of a burst pipe?
Shut off your home’s main water valve first, then cut power to any outlets or fixtures near standing water. The main shutoff is usually near the street-side water meter box or where the main line enters the house, often a round wheel valve or a lever handle.
If you can’t find the main valve in a few seconds, shut off the fixture valve closest to the break (under a sink, behind a toilet, at the washing machine) instead of wasting time searching. Then flip the breaker for any room with standing water near outlets or appliances, don’t touch switches or plugs with wet hands. Move furniture, rugs, and electronics off the wet floor if you can do it safely, but don’t wade through water near an energized outlet.
Recent job photo from ProRestoration Services.
Who do you call first, a plumber or a restoration company?
Call a licensed plumber to stop the source, and call a water damage restoration company at the same time, not after, because the water sitting on your floors and inside your walls starts causing secondary damage within hours, regardless of whether the pipe itself has been fixed. These are two different jobs done by two different licensed trades, and Bakersfield homeowners who call only one often lose a day waiting on the other.
A plumber diagnoses and repairs the actual break, whether it’s a corroded galvanized line in an older Westchester or East Bakersfield home, a slab leak, or a split supply hose. A restoration company handles everything the water touched: extracting standing water, drying wet drywall and flooring to the IICRC’s S500 water damage standard, and repairing what can’t be saved. ProRestoration Services runs 24/7 water damage response across Bakersfield and handles that second half, from extraction through reconstruction, once the leak itself is stopped.
If you’d rather make one call than track down two separate contractors, ProRestoration’s sister company, All Pro Plumbing, handles the plumbing repair and ProRestoration handles the drying and rebuild, same team, one phone call, no second contractor to coordinate mid-crisis.
What happens in the first 24 hours after a burst pipe?
The plumber isolates and repairs the broken line first, usually within a few hours of arrival, since a continuing leak makes everything downstream worse. Depending on where the pipe failed, that might mean a simple coupling repair or cutting into drywall or slab to access a hidden line.
Once the water source is stopped, the restoration crew gets to work on extraction: pulling standing water with truck-mounted or portable extractors, pulling baseboards and sometimes lower drywall to check for water trapped in wall cavities, and setting air movers and dehumidifiers to begin structural drying. A technician uses a moisture meter to map exactly how far the water traveled, often farther than it looks from the surface, before deciding what gets dried in place and what has to come out. Expect photo documentation throughout; it protects your insurance claim and gives you a record of what happened before the drywall goes back up.
Drying typically runs three to five days, with daily monitoring, before reconstruction (new drywall, paint, flooring) can start.
Will homeowners insurance cover this, and what should you document?
Most homeowners policies cover sudden, accidental water damage from a burst pipe, but they typically exclude damage from a leak that was gradual or went unaddressed for a long time, according to the Insurance Information Institute. Your deductible still applies, and the insurer will want documentation that the damage was sudden, not a slow leak you ignored for months.
Take photos and video of the damage before cleanup starts, keep the plumber’s invoice showing the cause of the break, and get an itemized scope of work from the restoration company before repairs begin. If you’ve already read our burst pipe emergency checklist, this is the insurance-documentation step it points you toward.
A burst pipe in Bakersfield is a two-call emergency: a licensed plumber to stop it, a restoration crew to dry it out before mold sets in. Call ProRestoration Services at (661) 393-9306 for the water removal and drying side the moment the leak is under control.
About ProRestoration Services
ProRestoration is an IICRC-certified, EPA Lead-Safe Certified restoration company serving Bakersfield, CA and Kern County, licensed under CSLB #960566. Their crews handle water damage restoration, emergency water removal, mold remediation, fire and smoke restoration, and reconstruction, working alongside sister company All Pro Plumbing so a burst pipe gets fixed and the water damage gets dried and rebuilt by one coordinated team.