Hour one is about the source: main shutoff or appliance valve, power off to wet rooms if water is near outlets, and phone photos of everything before it moves. Insurers and adjusters work from documentation, and the first hour is when the documentation is honest.
In Carlsbad, run the slab check in the first hour: walk the floors barefoot for a warm spot, look at the meter with everything off, and check the ceiling below any upstairs bathroom for sag. A warm floor patch plus a moving meter is the slab leak signature in this city, and it changes the first call from cleanup to locate and cleanup. Photograph the ceiling before it dries or falls; sagging drywall is evidence with a short life.
Hours two to six are extraction territory. Standing water does not wait politely: it wicks up drywall roughly an inch an hour at first and runs under flooring along the subfloor. A shop vac handles a spill; a room of water needs truck-mounted or portable extraction and then real drying equipment, not a box fan.
By hour twenty-four the question changes from 'is it wet' to 'what is still wet.' Moisture meters, not fingertips, answer that. If a contractor cannot show you readings, the drying is a guess - and guesses are how mold shows up in month two.
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