Burst pipe? Here's what to do in the first 15 minutes

Don't go looking for towels yet. The single thing that controls the size of this loss is how fast the water stops, so that comes first — before you mop, before you call anyone, before you start moving things. Everything below is in the order a DFW crew would tell you to do it over the phone while we're on our way.

What should you do first when a pipe bursts?

Shut off your home's main water valve immediately, then open the lowest faucet in the house to drain the remaining pressure. Cut power to the affected area at the breaker if water is near outlets or appliances. Move furniture and valuables out of the water, and call a restoration crew before mold starts.

That's the whole sequence in one breath. The rest of this guide is the detail behind each move — where the valve actually is, why you drain the lines, when the power matters, and what insurance needs you to capture before anyone touches the water. If you've already stopped the water and you're reading this on your phone, skip to documenting for insurance.

How do you shut off the water to a burst pipe?

Turn off the main shutoff valve, usually located where the water line enters your home — near the water heater, in the garage, or at the street meter. Turn the valve clockwise until it stops. If you can isolate the broken fixture with its own local valve, use that instead to keep water running elsewhere.

The thing most homeowners lose time on isn't turning the valve — it's finding it under pressure, in the dark, for the first time. The fix is to find it now, before anything happens. Walk your house this week: locate the main shutoff, locate the water heater's shutoff, and locate the local valves under every sink and behind every toilet. Tag the main with a bright zip tie. In a real burst, "I knew exactly where it was" is worth more than any tool in your garage.

One DFW-specific note: a large share of the burst pipes we see in Fort Worth and the suburbs aren't year-round failures — they're freeze events. When a hard freeze hits an uninsulated line in an attic, an exterior wall, or a garage, the pipe can split and then burst the moment it thaws and pressure returns. If you've just come through a freeze and water appears out of nowhere, treat it as a burst line, not a roof leak: shut the main first, then find the split.

The clock is the cost: what every extra hour does

A burst pipe is a volume problem before it's a damage problem. A common half-inch supply line under household pressure moves several gallons a minute. The table below is our field estimate of how a single unattended break scales — based on typical residential supply pressure and the jobs we run across DFW. The point isn't the exact gallon count; it's how fast the category of the job changes.

Does homeowners insurance cover a burst pipe?

Most Texas homeowners policies cover sudden, accidental water damage from a burst pipe, including the cost to tear out and replace what the water ruined. They do not cover damage from a leak you neglected over time. File your claim within a day and document everything with photos before cleanup begins.

The line that decides a burst-pipe claim is "sudden and accidental" versus "gradual." A supply line that splits in a freeze and floods your kitchen is the textbook covered event. A fitting that's been weeping behind a cabinet for eight months, rotting the subfloor, is the textbook exclusion — the carrier's position is that maintenance was your job. That's why your minute 10–15 photos matter so much: they're the proof that this was sudden, not a slow leak you ignored.

The Texas Department of Insurance lays out what a standard homeowners policy covers and how the claims process works in its homeowners insurance guide. Texas also has a prompt-payment law with hard deadlines on how fast a carrier has to acknowledge, decide, and pay a claim — we walk through that sequence in our Texas water damage insurance claim guide. Two things to know in the moment: start drying immediately (waiting for the adjuster only grows the loss, and your documentation covers you), and don't throw anything away until it's photographed and the adjuster has either seen it or released you to dispose of it.

What not to do in the first hour

The mistakes that turn a manageable burst into a big claim are almost always the same handful:

• Don't look for the leak before you kill the main. Every minute spent diagnosing is a minute the water keeps running. Stop it first, find it second.
• Don't step into standing water near outlets or a panel. If power could be live in the water, kill the breaker first or stay out and call for help. Nothing in the house is worth that risk.
• Don't wait for the insurance adjuster to start drying. Adjusters can take a day or more to schedule an inspection. Mold doesn't wait — it starts inside 24 to 48 hours per EPA. Document, then dry.
• Don't assume a "small" leak is dry once the surface looks dry. Water wicks into wall cavities, under cabinets, and into subfloor where you can't see it. A surface that feels dry can still be reading wet on a meter for days. Our restoration timeline guide explains why the dry call comes from moisture readings, not appearance.
• Don't toss damaged contents before documenting. Photograph everything, and keep ruined items until the adjuster signs off — they're part of your claim.

When to handle it yourself and when to call

A small, clean-water burst caught in the first few minutes — a supply line under a bathroom sink you shut off fast — is often something you can extract and dry yourself with a wet/dry vac, fans, and a couple of dry days. The jobs that need a crew are the ones where water got into the structure: it ran for more than a few minutes, it reached more than one room, it went into walls or under cabinets, it came through a ceiling, or it's been more than a day. At that point the question isn't whether things are wet — it's whether they'll dry before mold starts, and that takes commercial dehumidifiers, air movers, and daily moisture monitoring against the IICRC S500 drying standard.

If you're anywhere in DFW and water is moving right now, the most expensive minutes are the ones where nothing happens. Call us at 682-758-1624 — our Fort Worth water damage crew answers 24/7 and is usually on site within the hour. For the structural drying side of the job, see our water mitigation page.