When a pipe lets go under a Cerritos slab house, we come up the 605 and clean it out, any hour of the night
SOS Restoration covers Cerritos out of Long Beach, 24 hours a day: water extraction and structural drying, mold removal, fire and smoke cleanup, storm damage, and sewage cleanup. Cerritos is a short run up the 605, well inside the area we work. Call (657) 660-4185 and a person picks up.
What kind of water damage does a 1971 Cerritos tract house get?
In Cerritos the water almost always comes from inside the house. Copper under a 1970s slab going to pinholes, or a supply line behind a cabinet. Almost never from the sky.
Which means your neighbor’s plumbing is your plumbing. More than half the houses in this city went up inside the single decade of the 1970s, so the same pipe, run by the same crews in the same few years, is reaching the end of the same life on every street at once. If a plumber tells you he has done four of these on your block, he is not working you.
The town got built that fast because it had to. Cerritos was dairy pasture called Dairy Valley until it took its current name in 1967, and then the population more than doubled in the two years between 1970 and 1972. That is why the whole place has one birthday.
So the failures arrive on a schedule, all at once, citywide. Water heaters on their third or fourth replacement. Angle stops, those little oval valves under a sink or behind a toilet, that seize the second you try to close one. Braided supply hoses under a bathroom sink changed in 1998 and never again. And copper run through the slab, fifty-odd years old, going to pinholes, where the first sign is not a puddle but a warm strip of floor across the hallway and a water bill that jumped.
Where the plan has a second story, and a lot of these plans do, the loss falls instead of spreading. One upstairs supply line takes the ceiling below it, the wall cavity it runs down, and the flooring at the bottom. Three rooms out of one failure.
There is one more thing, and it is under the house rather than in it. The groundwater in much of Cerritos sits within a few feet of the surface, and the whole city is inside a state-mapped liquefaction zone, meaning ground that can behave like a liquid in a large earthquake. Damp soil gives a slab edge nothing to dry into. That is why the bottom plate, the horizontal run of lumber the wall studs stand on right at the floor, is the last reading to come down here.
In Cerritos, do I have to call somebody else for the mold, the smoke and the sewage?
SOS Restoration brings all five services to Cerritos on one number: water damage, mold removal, fire and smoke, storm damage and sewage cleanup, worked by the same crew that covers Long Beach and the cities around it.
Two things slow the first day down in a city built when this one was. Most Cerritos addresses land on the older side of the 1978 line, since nearly four homes in five went up between 1960 and 1979, so the paint gets handled as lead paint before the first cut into a painted board. And the acoustic ceiling texture that came with those tracts is treated as asbestos until somebody surveys it and says it is not, because the regional air district’s Rule 1403 requires that survey before any demolition. Both change how the containment plastic goes up. Either can change which day a room gets opened.
Spanish, if that is easier. Say so on the call and the rest of it happens in Spanish.
The same trucks cover Lakewood and Bellflower on the way over, though both of those are 1950s cities and the truck gets loaded differently for them.
On a 1970s slab, water damage work is extraction, structural drying and dehumidification, and the readings that settle the job come off the bottom plate and the slab edge, where a meter is awkward to hold and the water goes anyway
Drywall over a slab keeps growth low and out of sight, so mold removal and inspection here usually starts at a baseboard and the first eight inches of board, three weeks after a leak nobody saw
In the two-story plans the smoke climbs the stairwell into bedrooms the flame never came near, so fire and smoke damage work means board-up, soot, odor and contents in rooms that look untouched, plus the fire department's water coming back down through the same ceiling
Roofs re-covered two and three times over fifty years give up at the flashing, which makes storm damage in this city mostly tarping and roof leaks, on the two or three wet nights a winter when everyone calls together
The lateral, meaning the pipe that runs from your house out to the sewer main in the street, belongs to you and not to the city, and in houses this age that is where a backup usually starts, so sewage cleanup is extraction, pulling out the porous material, and cleaning what stays
What do I shut off while I wait, and how fast can somebody get here?
Shut the water off first. The meter box out by the sidewalk, or the angle stop under whatever let go. Then call. Long Beach is about ten miles down the 605 and we are open 24 hours, so the phone gets answered at three in the morning the same as at three in the afternoon.
Nobody is going to quote you a drive time, and you should not trust a company that does. The 605 at five o’clock is a different road than the 605 at two, and on the third wet night of a storm every phone in the city rings at once.
Shutting off is a simpler errand here than in the cities around Cerritos, because this city runs its own water utility instead of splitting the map between three or four companies. One system, one desk. The city also walked its service lines house by house for the federal lead rule and turned up no lead and no old galvanized pipe waiting to be replaced, so when something is leaking, it is on your side of the meter and your own shutoff is the one that matters.
Find the meter box and the angle stops on a dry afternoon. Every minute the water keeps running is another foot of wet baseboard.
How much does damage cleanup cost in Cerritos?
Water damage work starts at $60 an hour, an emergency call-out starts at $90 an hour, both depend on the job, and hours are what move a bill.
Nobody here quotes a total before somebody has taken a reading. What you get on the phone is the hourly rate and the number of machines we expect on a house that size. What sets the bill is how many days those machines run, how much of the wall and floor has to come out, and whether what arrived was clean water, gray water off a washing machine, or sewage. A firm total handed to you before a meter has touched a wall is a sales figure, not your house.
Damp ground buys extra equipment days, and an equipment day is one machine running for one more day. Over a slab sitting on soil that holds water a few feet down, plan on a day or two more of air movers than the same square footage takes on dry ground, and use the daily readings to hold us to it.
Some of this should cost you nothing. If what you have is a suspicion rather than a puddle, a bill that jumped and a warm patch of hallway, go read your own meter before you pay anybody by the hour. Shut every fixture in the house. Note where the little low-flow triangle sits, the one on the meter face that turns when anything at all is moving, leave it an hour with nobody flushing anything, and look again. Not moved, and the slab is not leaking, whatever the bill did. Crept, and you have a leak under the floor and a number to open the call with.
How an hourly invoice reads line by line, and which lines belong on a mitigation bill at all, is worked through on the cost page.
Does it flood in Cerritos?
Cerritos does not flood from rain in an ordinary year. Not one property inside the city limits sits on the federal repetitive-loss list, which is the register of addresses that have flooded and been paid out more than once. The only citywide flood anybody has bothered to model is Prado Dam letting go, and nobody has ever called us about that.
If a lender or a title company asks you for a flood-zone determination on a Cerritos house, the answer is FEMA Zone X for every address in town, and the community number they want is 060108. Write it down once and you will not have to look it up again.
What actually happens here when it rains is smaller and more irritating. A roof that gives up at the flashing, the sheet metal that seals the seam where a roof meets a wall or a chimney. A patio area drain packed with leaves, backing water up against a slider. A garage that takes an inch off the driveway. The area drain is the one worth walking out to before the first storm, because a Cerritos backyard drain nobody has opened since the last owner is solid with sycamore leaf.
What happens after you leave?
What you keep is the drying file, and once the water is gone that file is the part of the job that still does work for you.
It holds the before photographs, shot while the water was still on the floor. A map of how far it traveled. A daily number for every wet material. An equipment log naming each machine, the room it ran in and the days it was there. And a written scope listing what got cut out of the walls. Every one of those numbers is measured against a dry standard. That is your own back bedroom’s meter number, the one the water never reached, and the hallway is only done when it reads the same.
Board, texture, paint, baseboard, flooring and cabinets are the next contractor’s scope, on its own permit at the Cerritos counter. Give that contractor the moisture log so the day each material read dry is on paper. Ask for their license number. Ask them to run their own meter over the bottom plate the morning they hang board, because a cavity closed up at eighteen percent is the mold call in March.
One Cerritos thing worth raising early instead of at the counter. Because the whole city sits in that liquefaction zone, the finding surfaces in plan check the moment a scope goes past board and paint into framing or foundation. Ask about it before your schedule depends on the answer.
Call us if any of it reads wet again once the equipment is gone, and somebody comes back out to put a meter on it. The hours are on the contact page.
Nearby
Cerritos is the far east corner of the map, up the 605 from Long Beach; Lakewood and Bellflower sit on the way, so the same route covers all three.
Can't call right now? Send it and we call you.
Your phone number is the only thing we really need. Everything else helps us load the truck right.
If a floor is wet in a Cerritos house tonight, call (657) 660-4185 and tell us which room you are standing in, because somebody picks up at three in the morning every night of the year.