Water damage restoration field guide: dry it fast, IICRC S500

What water damage restoration is, and why it is a race

Water damage restoration is the work of drying a building out and saving what can be saved after a leak or a flood. Mitigation is the front half of that work, the part that stops the loss from getting worse: stop the water, pull out the standing water, and get the structure drying before it rots, swells, or grows mold. Restoration is the back half, the rebuild of whatever had to come out.

The reason it is a race is biology and money. Mold can begin to grow in porous materials in roughly 24 to 48 hours under the right temperature and humidity, a window cited in EPA mold guidance, so every hour the building sits wet is an hour closer to a mold job instead of a drying job. Wet material also keeps losing strength and finish the longer it stays wet, and clean water turns dirty over time, so a one-day delay can turn a dry-in-place job into a tear-out. Fast extraction and fast drying are the whole game.

How aggressively you remove versus dry comes down to two things the standard makes you decide up front. The category of the water tells you how contaminated it is, from clean to grossly contaminated, and that sets your protective equipment and what can be saved. The class tells you how much water there is and how hard it will be to evaporate, and that sets the drying effort. The work itself is a sequence: inspect and map the moisture, extract the standing water, build a drying environment, and monitor daily to a dry standard. The mold remediation guide covers what happens when growth has already started, and the below-grade waterproofing guide covers keeping ground water out in the first place. This guide is the drying side.

Why drying it fast is the whole job

Speed is the single most important thing on a water loss, more than the brand of dehumidifier, more than the crew size. Mold can start in roughly 24 to 48 hours, clean water degrades toward contaminated as it sits, and porous materials keep wicking water deeper into the structure the longer they stay wet. Get there fast and a Category 1 supply-line break can often be dried in place. Get there two days late and the same break is a tear-out with a mold problem on top.

The cost curve follows the clock. Early, the bill is extraction and a few days of equipment. Late, the bill is demolition, disposal, mold remediation, and a rebuild, and the materials you could have saved are in the dumpster. This is why restoration is treated as an emergency service and why crews roll at night. The job that pays is the one that started drying the day the water showed up.

Lean on the standard here rather than a stopwatch. The ANSI/IICRC S500 standard frames water damage as time-sensitive and ties the response to limiting secondary damage, and the EPA puts the mold window at 24 to 48 hours. Treat both as the reason to move now, not as a guarantee that hour 47 is safe. The actual rate depends on temperature, humidity, and what got wet, so the safe assumption on every job is that the clock is already running against you.

What are the water categories?

The category of water describes how contaminated it is, and it sets your protective equipment and the save-versus-remove decision before drying even starts. IICRC S500 defines three. Category 1 is water from a sanitary source with no significant contamination. Category 2 carries significant contamination and can cause illness on contact or ingestion. Category 3 is grossly contaminated, carrying pathogens, sewage, or chemicals.

The category is a judgment call you make at the source and at the materials the water touched, not a label you copy off the last job. A clean supply line into a finished basement is Category 1 at the pipe, but if it ran across a floor of contaminated material or sat for days, it is no longer clean. Treat the category as the controlling decision for protective equipment and demolition, and let IICRC S500 and the insurer's adjuster settle any borderline call rather than guessing low to save tear-out.

The category does not tell you how much water there is. That is the class, covered below. A clean Category 1 loss can still be a large Class 3 or Class 4 drying project, and a small Category 3 backup can be a light drying job once the contaminated material is gone. You set both on the same inspection.

Category 3 black water: the dangerous one

Category 3 is the water you respect. Sewage backups, river and storm flooding, ground surface water, and toilet overflow with solids all land here, along with any Category 1 or 2 water that sat long enough to grow bacteria. It carries pathogens and toxins, and contact or ingestion is a real health risk, so it is treated as a biohazard job, not just a wet job.

The rule on Category 3 is that porous material that was saturated does not get dried, it gets removed. Carpet, pad, drywall, insulation, and saturated wood come out and go to disposal, because you cannot reliably decontaminate the inside of a porous material in place. The industry position is consistent on this: saturated porous materials in Category 3 are not salvageable and should be removed and handled as contaminated waste. Save the structural framing and the hard, cleanable surfaces, decontaminate them, then dry. Throw out the rest.

Do not freelance the protective equipment or the containment on a Category 3 job. The required respirator, gloves, suits, and containment depend on the contaminant and the conditions, so follow IICRC S500, the protective-equipment manufacturer's ratings, and your own safety program rather than habit. If the contamination is heavy or there is a question of regulated waste, that is a call for a qualified professional and the adjuster, not a judgment to make alone on site.

Does the water category change over time?

Yes. The category is not fixed at the moment of the loss; it degrades as the water sits, warms, and feeds on the material it touched. IICRC S500 is explicit that time and temperature can change the category, so a clean Category 1 break that sits in a warm building for a day or two can become Category 2, and a Category 2 loss left longer can become Category 3 as bacteria multiply.

The practical rule is to treat older water as worse than it looks. A Category 1 break found within hours is a different job from the same break found after a long weekend, even though the source was identical. Distance matters too: clean water that has run across contaminated flooring or through a wall cavity full of debris is no longer clean by the time it pools.

This is another reason speed wins. Moving fast keeps a clean loss clean and a gray loss from going black, which keeps material savable and the bill down. When you arrive late, document the dwell time and the conditions, set the category to what the water actually is now, and let the standard and the adjuster confirm it rather than calling it clean because the source was clean.

What are the classes of water?

The class of water describes how much water there is and how hard it will be to evaporate, and it sets the drying effort and the equipment count. IICRC S500 defines four classes by the amount of absorption and the evaporation load. Class 1 is the least water and the lowest evaporation demand, affecting part of a room. Class 4 is deeply bound moisture in low-evaporation materials like hardwood, plaster, concrete, and masonry, which need specialty drying.

Class is about square footage of wet material and how porous it is, not contamination. Class 2 typically means a whole room with water wicked up the walls a foot or two and carpet and pad soaked. Class 3 is the most water, usually because it came from overhead and the ceilings, walls, and insulation are saturated. Class 4 is the slow one, where the water is locked into dense materials that release it grudgingly and the job runs longer no matter how much equipment you stage.

Use the class to size the drying system, but verify it with readings rather than treating it as a fixed recipe. The equipment counts that follow from the class are starting points in IICRC S500 and the dehumidifier manufacturer's tables, and they get adjusted for the actual temperature, humidity, and material porosity on site. The class tells you roughly how big the job is. The daily moisture readings tell you whether you sized it right.

The restoration process, start to finish

The work runs in a fixed order, and the order matters because each step sets up the next. You inspect and assess, you extract the standing water, you build a drying environment, you monitor daily to a dry standard, and only then do you restore. Skip ahead and you pay for it. Start drying before you extract and you are running dehumidifiers against water that a vacuum would have pulled out in minutes.

Each step has a job. Inspect and assess finds the source, maps the wet, and sets the category and class so you know what you are dealing with. Extraction removes the bulk water fast, because pulling it out beats evaporating it by a wide margin. The drying environment evaporates the bound moisture off surfaces and pulls it out of the air. Monitoring proves the materials reach the dry standard instead of just feeling dry. Restoration rebuilds what came out, and it waits until the structure is proven dry.

Treat this sequence as the IICRC S500 framework rather than a rigid script. The standard lays out the principles of drying and the order of operations, and the specifics flex with the category, the class, and the building. What does not flex is the logic: find it, get the bulk water out, dry the rest, prove it, then rebuild.

Inspect and assess: find all the wet

The inspection is where the job is won or lost, because water you do not find is water you do not dry, and water you do not dry grows mold behind a wall you already closed up. Start by confirming the source is stopped, then map the moisture: where the water went, how far it wicked, and what materials it saturated. Set the category and the class on this same pass.

Water does not stay where it landed. It runs downhill, wicks up drywall like a sponge, travels under flooring, and fills wall cavities you cannot see from the room. The carpet can feel dry on top while the pad under it is soaked, and the bottom plate of a wall can be wet two rooms away from the leak. Use moisture meters and, where you have them, thermal imaging to find the edges of the wet, and mark them so you can watch them shrink as the job dries.

Confirm the source is actually dead before you commit to drying. There is no point running equipment on a building that is still taking water, whether from a supply line that was not fully shut, a roof that still leaks in rain, or ground water pushing through a foundation. Stopping plumbing leaks is its own discipline, and keeping ground water out is what the below-grade waterproofing guide covers. The drying job assumes the water has stopped coming in.

Why extract before you dry?

Extraction is the highest-value minutes on the whole job, because removing the standing water directly pulls out far more water than evaporation ever will. The rule in the trade is plain: more water comes out by extraction than by any other method. Every gallon you vacuum up is a gallon your dehumidifiers do not have to chase out of the air over the next three days. The more you pull, the less you have to dry, and the faster the building reaches the dry standard.

Use the right tool for the volume. A truck-mount or a portable extractor pulls water out of carpet and off hard floors fast, and a weighted or stand-on extraction tool presses the water out of carpet and pad far better than the wand alone. The fibers can feel nearly dry while the pad underneath is still saturated, so keep extracting the pad until the water stops coming, not until the surface feels right.

Speed here pays twice. Fast, thorough extraction shortens the drying days, which cuts equipment cost and the chance of mold, and it limits how far the water keeps wicking into materials you would rather save. Do not shortchange extraction to get the air movers running. The order is bulk water out first, then build the drying environment around what is left.

Building the drying environment

Drying a structure is not the same as setting fans and waiting. You are building an environment where evaporation runs fast and the evaporated water gets removed instead of recondensing somewhere else in the building. Two pieces of equipment do this together. Air movers push high-velocity air across wet surfaces to evaporate the moisture into the air. Dehumidifiers pull that moisture back out of the air so the room can keep accepting more.

They have to be balanced. Air movers without enough dehumidification just move humid air around and load the building with vapor that condenses on cool surfaces and feeds mold. Dehumidifiers without enough air movement dry only the air, while the bound moisture stays locked in the materials. The IICRC S500 framework treats temperature, airflow, and humidity as one system, and the equipment counts that follow from the class are starting points you adjust to the readings.

Pick the dehumidifier to the conditions. A low-grain refrigerant, or LGR, dehumidifier can drive the air much drier than a standard refrigerant unit and keeps working as the room gets dry, which is most of what restoration crews run. A desiccant dehumidifier uses an absorbent to pull moisture independent of temperature and holds up in cold or very dry conditions where refrigerant units fade, which is why they show up on Class 4 and cold-weather jobs. Size and select to IICRC S500 and the manufacturer's performance tables for the actual temperature and load, not to whatever is on the truck.

Psychrometry: the science of drying

Psychrometry is the science of the air-and-moisture relationship, and it is what separates drying a building on purpose from drying it by luck. The core idea is a loop. Air movers evaporate water off the materials and put it into the air. Dehumidifiers pull that water back out of the air. Heat speeds the evaporation. You manage temperature, humidity, and airflow together so the loop keeps running until the materials give up their bound moisture.

The number the trade tracks is grains per pound, or GPP, which is the amount of water vapor in a pound of dry air. Lower GPP air is thirstier air, so it pulls moisture out of materials faster. You read the GPP coming into the dehumidifier and going out, and the drop across the machine tells you it is actually removing water. A standard refrigerant dehumidifier loses its grip as the air dries out, often around 50 GPP, while an LGR can keep pulling the air down well below 40 GPP, which is why it dries faster late in the job.

Dry to a goal, not to a guess. The psychrometric readings, the GPP, the relative humidity, the temperature, plus the material moisture content, are what tell you the environment is working and when it is time to add or pull equipment. Lean on IICRC S500 and the dehumidifier manufacturer for the target conditions and the sizing math. The science is what lets you prove the building is drying, day over day, instead of hoping it is.

How do you know the building is dry?

You know it is dry by measuring it daily against a dry standard, not by touching it. This is the proof step, and it is the one that gets skipped under schedule pressure, which is exactly how mold ends up inside a wall that was closed before it was dry. Take moisture readings of the affected materials every day, log them, and watch them trend down toward the dry standard set from an unaffected area of the same material.

Daily monitoring does two jobs. It proves to you, and to the adjuster, that the materials are actually reaching dry, and it tells you whether the drying environment is sized right or needs more equipment. If a reading stalls for a day, something is wrong: a wet cavity you missed, a dehumidifier that quit, or a material that needs specialty drying. The log is what catches it.

Do not pull the equipment until the materials hit the dry standard, even if they look and feel dry. Surfaces dry first and the core last, so a wall that feels dry on the face can be wet inside. IICRC S500 ties the end of drying to documented moisture content reaching the dry goal, so let the readings, not the calendar or the customer's patience, decide when the air movers come out. Pulling early is one of the most common ways a clean drying job turns into a mold callback.

Moisture meters: pin and pinless

Moisture meters are how you map the wet and prove the dry, and there are two kinds you carry for two jobs. A pinless meter scans the surface and reads moisture below it without making holes, which is fast for sweeping a wall or floor and marking where the wet stops. A pin meter pushes two probes into the material for a reading at a specific depth, which lets you test each layer, the carpet, the pad, and the subfloor, separately.

Use them together. The pinless meter is for mapping, gliding it across walls and floors to find the boundary where the readings drop back to the dry standard and marking that line so you can watch it shrink. The pin meter is for the precise checks and for the layered materials, and on a flood it is often the only way to know whether the subfloor under a dry-feeling carpet is still wet. Pinless meters usually read on a relative scale rather than a true percentage, so they are excellent for finding moisture and less precise for confirming final dryness.

The reading is only as good as the baseline. Establish the dry standard by metering the same material in an unaffected part of the building, then take daily readings of the affected material and log every one. That daily record, baseline plus trend, is both your proof the building is drying and the documentation the claim runs on.

The dry standard, or drying goal

The dry standard is the moisture content of the affected material when it is dry, and you get it by measuring the same material somewhere the water never reached. Meter the drywall, the framing, or the flooring in an unaffected room or closet, and that reading is your target. You are not drying to zero and you are not drying to a number off a chart. You are drying the wet material back to what its dry neighbor reads.

This matters because materials carry different amounts of moisture when they are genuinely dry depending on the building, the season, and the material. A piece of framing that reads a certain value in a humid coastal building in summer is dry at that value, and chasing a lower number wastes days and equipment. The unaffected-area baseline keeps the goal honest and specific to the building you are actually in.

Write the dry standard down at the start and the daily readings against it all the way through. The drying goal is a documented target with a baseline, a trend, and an end point you can defend, which is what IICRC S500 expects and what the adjuster wants to see before paying for the days of equipment. Dry to it, prove you hit it, then stop.

What gets removed and what gets dried?

The demolition decision comes down to the category of the water and the material it soaked. The principle is to save the structure and dry it, and remove the porous materials that either cannot be dried in place or are contaminated. The framing, the studs, and the hard surfaces usually stay and get dried. The soft, porous stuff is where the judgment lives.

Carpet pad is the usual first casualty. It holds water, dries slowly, and is cheap to replace, so on most losses beyond a light Category 1 it comes out rather than gets dried in place. Wet drywall gets the flood cut: you cut the drywall out a set height above the high-water line, commonly 12 to 24 inches, remove the saturated insulation behind it, and open the cavity so the studs and the back of the wall can dry. Water wicks up drywall, so cutting above the wet line and clearing the insulation is what lets the structure dry instead of trapping moisture in the wall.

Category 3 changes the math entirely. Saturated porous materials that touched black water, carpet, pad, drywall, insulation, and saturated wood, come out and go to disposal, because you cannot reliably clean the inside of a porous material that held contaminated water. Save and decontaminate the hard structure, remove the rest. Lean on IICRC S500 and the adjuster for the borderline calls. The cost of an extra flood cut is small next to the cost of leaving contaminated material in a wall.

The mold link: dry it in time or it is a different job

Drying and mold are the same problem on a clock. Dry the building inside the window and mold never gets a foothold, which is the entire point of moving fast. Mold can begin in porous materials in roughly 24 to 48 hours under favorable temperature and humidity, per EPA guidance, so the drying job and the mold-prevention job are one and the same when you arrive early.

Once growth has started, the work changes. It is no longer just drying, it is remediation, and that means containing the area under negative pressure so spores do not spread, removing the contaminated porous materials, cleaning what can be cleaned, and verifying the result. That work runs to a different standard, the ANSI/IICRC S520 for mold remediation, and it is covered in the mold remediation guide. If you open a wall and find established growth, stop treating it as a simple dry-out, contain it, and bring in the mold side.

The honest framing on every late job is that you may be drying and remediating at once. Dry the structure, but if there is visible growth or a musty smell from a cavity, scope the mold work to S520 alongside the drying. The two jobs share the same root cause, water, which is why fixing the moisture is the first step in both.

Stop the source first

There is no drying a building that is still taking on water. The first move on any loss is to stop the source, whether that is shutting a supply line, capping a failed fitting, stopping an appliance, tarping a roof, or dealing with ground water finding its way in. Run equipment on a building that is still leaking and you are drying against a tap that is still open.

Match the fix to the cause. A burst supply line or a failed water heater is a plumbing stop, and it has to be a real repair or a reliable isolation, not a towel and a prayer. A roof or window leak in an ongoing storm needs to be sealed before the inside dries, because the next rain undoes the work. Ground water pushing through a basement wall or slab is a different problem entirely, one of hydrostatic pressure and exterior drainage, which the below-grade waterproofing guide covers in depth.

Confirm the source is dead, then start. Document what the source was and how it was stopped, because the cause drives both the category call and the insurance question of what is covered. A sudden pipe burst and a long-term seepage are different losses to an adjuster even when the wet floor looks the same.

Insurance and documentation: the documented job gets paid

Most water losses are insurance jobs, and the documented job is the one that gets paid. The adjuster was not there when the water was at its worst, so your record is the only proof of what you found and what you did. Photos before, during, and after, the moisture map, the daily readings, the category and class, the scope of what came out, and the Xactimate estimate are what turn a pile of wet drywall into a paid claim.

Xactimate is the estimating software most carriers price water work in, and it organizes the job by water category and the line items that go with it: extraction, disposal of contaminated water and materials, flood cuts, anti-microbial application, equipment days, and the rest. Scope the job to what you actually did and price it in the carrier's system, with the documentation behind every line. A line item without a photo or a reading to back it is a line item the adjuster questions.

Capture it as you go, not from memory at the end. A field app like FieldOS keeps the photos, the daily moisture readings, the equipment list, and the scope tied to the job so the package is ready when the adjuster asks, instead of a scramble through a phone's camera roll a week later. The crew that documents in real time gets paid faster and argues less.

Daily documentation: no doc, no pay

Documentation is not paperwork you do at the end. It is a daily habit on a water job, because the proof that the building dried is a trend, not a single reading, and the trend only exists if you logged it every day. The adjuster pays for the days of equipment because the daily log shows the materials were still wet and trending down, not because you say they were.

Record the same things every visit: the temperature and relative humidity, the GPP, the moisture content of the affected materials against the dry standard, what equipment is running and where, and dated photos. Note any change to the scope, like an added flood cut or a stalled reading that needed more equipment. The day a reading stalls and you respond is exactly the day the log needs to show you caught it.

The blunt version is no doc, no pay. A drying job that worked but has no readings behind it is a fight with the carrier, and a perfect job with a gap in the log is a deduction. Keep the record clean and current and the claim mostly handles itself.

Safety: biohazard, electrical, and the slip

Water jobs hurt people in ways that look obvious in hindsight, so treat the hazards as the first decision on site, not an afterthought. The big three are contamination, electricity, and slips, and Category 3 stacks all three.

Category 3 water is a biohazard. Sewage and floodwater carry pathogens, and the protective equipment, the respirator, the gloves, the suit, and the containment that keeps the contamination from spreading, has to match the actual exposure. Follow IICRC S500, the equipment manufacturer's ratings, and your safety program for what to wear and how to contain, and call a qualified professional when the contamination is heavy or the waste is regulated. This is not the place to improvise.

Water and electricity together are a shock hazard, full stop. Before anyone steps into standing water, confirm the power to the affected area is off and verified off, because a submerged outlet or a live cord in the water can kill. Wet floors are a slip hazard for the crew and for the occupants, and air movers and cords add trip hazards on top. The air quality can be a hazard too once materials are wet and growth starts. None of these is a place to hedge. Verify the power is dead, wear the equipment the water category calls for, and control the walking surface before the real work starts.

The equipment, sized to the class

The equipment list on a water job is short and each piece has a job. Extractors pull the bulk water out. Air movers evaporate moisture off the surfaces. Dehumidifiers pull that moisture out of the air. Air scrubbers with HEPA filtration clean the air on contaminated jobs and where there is growth. Moisture meters and a thermo-hygrometer measure the wet and the air so you can prove the drying.

The counts come from the class and the conditions, not from filling the truck. IICRC S500 and the dehumidifier manufacturer give starting points, such as a dehumidifier per a range of square footage for a given class, and you adjust those for the actual temperature, humidity, and how porous the wet materials are. Under-stage the equipment and the building dries too slowly and mold gets its window. Over-stage it and you are billing equipment the job did not need, which the adjuster will trim.

Match the dehumidifier to the job, as the drying section covers: LGR for most restoration drying, desiccant for cold or deeply bound Class 4 work. The right answer is the readings. Stage the equipment to the class, then let the daily moisture and psychrometric numbers tell you whether to add, hold, or pull.

Contents: pack-out, save, or toss

The building is not the only thing that got wet. The contents, the furniture, the boxes, the documents, the personal property, all have to be sorted, and that sort is its own part of the job. Decide what can be dried and saved, what has to go, and what needs to leave the space so the structure can dry.

A pack-out moves contents off-site to dry and store them while the structure is dried and rebuilt, which both protects the items and clears the room for equipment. Inventory everything as it goes, with photos, because the contents are part of the claim and the owner needs a record of what left and in what condition. Category drives the save-versus-toss call here too: porous contents soaked in Category 3 water generally do not get saved, while hard goods can be cleaned.

Documents and irreplaceable items get special handling, including specialty drying like freeze-drying for paper, and they are worth flagging to the owner early. The contents decisions are easier to defend when they are inventoried and photographed up front rather than reconstructed later.

What to record

The record on a water job is the category and class, the moisture map, the daily readings against the dry standard, the equipment, the scope, and the photos. Each one answers a question the adjuster or the owner will ask later, and each one is easier to capture as it happens than to reconstruct. Tie it all to the job in a field app like FieldOS so the package is one place, not scattered across a camera roll, a notebook, and someone's memory.

Common mistakes

• Drying too slowly, so mold gets its 24 to 48 hour window before the building is dry.
• Relying on evaporation instead of extracting the standing water first.
• Pulling the equipment before the material hits the dry standard because it feels dry.
• Wearing the wrong protective equipment for the water category, especially treating Category 3 like a clean loss.
• No daily documentation, so the readings cannot prove the drying and the claim gets cut.
• Drying a building that is still taking on water because the source was never fully stopped.
• Calling old water clean because the source was clean, ignoring that the category degrades over time.
• Drying the carpet face while the soaked pad and subfloor underneath stay wet.

Field checklist

Standards and references

The standard the trade works to is the ANSI/IICRC S500, the standard for professional water damage restoration. It defines the categories of water, the classes of water, the principles of drying, and the sequence from inspection through to a documented dry standard. Treat its category and class definitions, its drying principles, and its dry-standard expectation as the framework for the job, and confirm the current edition, since the standard is revised over time.

Two other authorities sit alongside it. The equipment manufacturer governs the sizing, the performance, and the operating conditions for the dehumidifiers, air movers, and meters you run, so use the manufacturer's tables for the count and the target conditions rather than a rule of thumb. The insurer and the adjuster govern the scope and the pricing, usually through Xactimate, so document the work to what the carrier needs to pay it. When mold growth is already present, the work crosses into the ANSI/IICRC S520 standard for mold remediation, covered in the mold remediation guide.

The three things to carry off this guide: dry it fast, because mold can start in roughly 24 to 48 hours; extract the standing water before you build the drying environment, because extraction removes far more water than evaporation; and monitor daily to the dry standard and document it, because the proven, documented job is the one that prevents mold and gets paid. Hedge the category, the class, the drying targets, and the dry standard to IICRC S500, the manufacturer, and the insurer, and never hedge the safety.

Units and terms

Water restoration carries its own vocabulary, and the same loss reads differently across a scope sheet, a manufacturer's manual, and an insurance estimate. These are the terms that show up on every job.

Mitigation is the emergency front half of the work that limits the loss, and restoration is the rebuild that follows. The category is the contamination level, 1 clean, 2 gray, 3 black. The class, 1 through 4, is the amount of water and the evaporation load. Extraction is the mechanical removal of standing water. Psychrometry is the science of the air-and-moisture relationship, measured partly in GPP, grains of water vapor per pound of dry air. An air mover evaporates moisture off surfaces, and a dehumidifier removes it from the air. The dry standard is the moisture content of the same material in an unaffected area, the target you dry back to. A flood cut is the removal of drywall a set height above the water line so the wall cavity can dry or be decontaminated.

Mitigation / restoration

Mitigation is the emergency work that stops the loss from worsening; restoration is the rebuild of what was removed

Category 1 / 2 / 3

The contamination level of the water: 1 clean from a sanitary source, 2 gray with significant contamination, 3 black and grossly contaminated

Class 1 to 4

The amount of water and evaporation load: 1 the least, 4 deeply bound moisture in hardwood, plaster, or concrete

Extraction

Mechanical removal of standing water, which pulls out far more water than evaporation

Psychrometry / GPP

The science of the air-moisture relationship; GPP is grains of water vapor per pound of dry air

Air mover vs dehumidifier

An air mover evaporates moisture off surfaces; a dehumidifier removes that moisture from the air

Dry standard

The moisture content of the same material in an unaffected area, the documented target you dry back to

Flood cut

Removing drywall a set height above the water line, commonly 12 to 24 inches, so the cavity can dry or be decontaminated

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