Signal Hill is mostly 1980s houses sitting on slab over the old oil field, and when one of them takes on water at 2am, or smoke, or sewage, we are the ones who clean it out.
SOS Restoration covers Signal Hill around the clock: pulling the water out and drying the structure, fire and smoke work, mold removal, storm damage, sewage. Long Beach wraps around this town on every side, so nobody is driving in from another county to reach you. The number is (657) 660-4185, and a person answers it.
We are on a hill. Where is the water even coming from?
While you wait on us, do this much, in this order.
- Shut the water off. That is the little oval valve behind the fixture that failed, the angle stop; if you cannot tell which fixture it was, go to the meter at the curb and shut the whole house down.
- If the water has run as far as an outlet, an extension cord or the base of the water heater, kill that breaker before you step back into the room.
- Find the low corner of the room and check the wall there first, even if the leak was at the other end. Nothing in this town sits level for long.
- Photograph the room wide, then get down on the wet edge: baseboard, the toe kick under the cabinets, the dark line creeping across the carpet.
- Pull the surface water with towels or a wet/dry vac, and get furniture legs up onto foil or blocks before the finish bleeds into the floor.
- Open the closet and cabinet doors on the wet wall so the air trapped in there has somewhere to go.
Almost never from outside. Signal Hill houses flood from the inside: a supply line under the dishwasher, or a water heater that let go in a garage closet while everybody was at work. The weather barely figures into it.
What decides how the drying goes is the age of the house, and up here that mostly runs in your favor. Fewer than a quarter of the homes in Signal Hill were finished before 1960, because the oil field held the land until the 1980s. So when the wall opens, we find drywall, copper or the white flexible plastic supply line people call PEX, and a slab underneath. Tract framing on a slab holds water low, down in the bottom plate, which is the flat board the studs are nailed to where they meet the concrete, and in the first eight inches of drywall above it. None of that looks wrong from the doorway.
And it does not stay where it started, because the whole town is on a slope. Water here does not come up. It comes down: off the grade, along a driveway, over a garage threshold, into the low corner of a slab living room, and it keeps moving after it is inside.
Worth knowing before anybody writes the word flood on your paperwork: Signal Hill has no federal flood hazard areas. There is one low-risk patch on the southwestern boundary and that is the whole list. What the city actually watches for on the hill is landslide, north of Panorama Promenade and southwest of Sunset View Park. So a Signal Hill house that takes on water in a storm took on runoff that found a low door, and that is a different line on a claim.
Does that one number also cover the mold, the smoke, and the sewage?
All five run out of Signal Hill on the one number: water, mold, fire and smoke, storm, sewage. SOS Restoration takes the emergency end of each one, which is stopping it, drying it, cleaning it, and hauling out what is ruined.
En español también. Tell whoever answers, and the whole job runs in Spanish from there.
Water damage
Mold
Fire and smoke
Storm damage
Sewage
How fast can someone get to Signal Hill?
We dispatch out of Long Beach, which wraps completely around Signal Hill’s 2.25 square miles, so there is no freeway crossing between our trucks and your street and no county line to leave. We are open 24 hours, and a call at 3am reaches a person rather than an answering service that leaves a message for Monday. If we are already on another job when you call, you will hear that on the phone, along with where you sit in the night, instead of a number somebody made up to keep you from calling the next company.
What we will not do is put an arrival time in minutes on a truck before we know where the truck is. The part that actually changes how bad this gets is the twenty minutes at the top of this page, and that part is yours.
Tell us the room, the floor covering, and how long it ran, and the truck gets loaded for that before it leaves. How a call goes, start to finish, is the same here as it is in Lakewood or Carson, though those two sit under different permit counters again.
Does a 1980s Signal Hill house cost less to dry out?
Usually, and the decade on the permit is the reason. Federal lead-paint rules apply to anything built before 1978, and they add hours before the first cut is made: seal the room off, work wet, clean up to a stricter standard. A 1920s Long Beach bungalow gets all of that, and more than half of Long Beach went up before 1960. A tract house up here from 1986 usually does not, because the 1980s were this town’s biggest building decade. Asbestos runs on its own threshold, and the air district holds every city in the basin to it alike, so a survey still happens once demolition gets past the small-job line.
The rate does not move with the address: in Signal Hill, water damage work starts at $60 an hour and an emergency call-out starts at $90 an hour, on the hours actually worked, and the rest depends on the job. What moves the total is how many machines the room needs and how many days they run. A wet bathroom of tile and drywall is three air movers, the low blowers set on the floor and aimed along the wall, and one dehumidifier. A slab living room that sat from Friday to Sunday is closer to eight movers and two dehumidifiers, and how much longer they stay is a question the meter answers on day three.
How an hourly invoice fares once an insurance estimate gets hold of it is worked out line by line on the cost page.
Whose pipe is this — mine, Signal Hill's, or the County's?
If the water is rising out of the parkway, that strip of grass between your sidewalk and the curb, or backing up through the lowest drain in the house instead of out of a fixture you can point at, it is not your pipe. In Signal Hill that means one of two agencies, and neither one is who your neighbors three blocks south would call.
Call the wrong one and you lose an hour on hold. Signal Hill runs its own water system, off two wells it owns down in north Long Beach, and the Long Beach Water Department serves every street on the far side of the boundary and not one street inside it. The sewer under that same asphalt belongs to somebody else again, the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County.
Photograph the water, note the time, and start pulling it out while the question of whose pipe it is gets sorted. Two desks, two phone calls, and neither one dries your floor.
What happens after you leave?
When SOS Restoration leaves a Signal Hill house you keep the drying file. In it: a moisture map of how far the water traveled, the daily readings set against a dry standard, the number off a wall the water never reached, photographs running from the first walkthrough to the last meter shot, every machine listed with the days it ran, and the invoice at billed by the hour, with those hours on it.
That file exists because the next scope belongs to somebody else. Cabinets, flooring, drywall, texture and paint go on a separate estimate under a separate permit, and the permit is where this city stops resembling its neighbor.
Here is the one that catches out-of-town contractors. Signal Hill will not issue a building permit, anywhere in town, known oil well on your lot or not, until somebody files a methane report: a survey of the ground under the parcel and a plan for venting the gas. That sits in the municipal code, and the reason for it is underneath the whole place, close to 2,600 oil wells drilled inside these city limits. Whoever does your repairs needs that report in hand before filing, or the rebuild waits while it gets written.
So ask whoever picks the work up from here for four things: their license number, the methane report before they file, written confirmation that the inside of the wall read dry the day they closed it up, and their own meter reading on the wall the morning they hang drywall. Then keep the file after the room looks finished. If that wall reads wet again two winters from now, the old numbers are what tells an insurer this is a fresh loss and not the same leak nobody ever fixed. Lose your copy and the contact page gets you another one.
Nearby
Signal Hill sits inside Long Beach, so the same truck covers both without a freeway in between; the other cities on this list are the next ring out.
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 there is water on the floor of a Signal Hill house right now, call (657) 660-4185 — the line is answered at any hour — and say whether it is coming from a fixture or up out of the lowest drain, because that decides whether we are calling Signal Hill's own water utility or the County.