Water Damage Restoration in Everett, WA

Everett has the oldest housing in this service area, and water damage restoration in Everett often means working on homes where plumbing, drains and roofs have been patched and repaired over many decades. North Everett, in ZIP 98201, has a median home built around 1961, and older houses there can have aging drain lines, wood floors and plaster walls. When water appears, crews stop the source, extract standing water and use moisture meters and thermal cameras to follow it through walls, subfloors and lower levels. If the water came up through a floor drain, it is treated as contaminated, and the area is cleaned and disinfected before drying. Clean-water drying should begin the same day so wood floors and framing do not stay wet.

South of downtown the housing gets newer: ZIP 98203 has a median build year around 1975, and 98204 and 98208 sit around 1989 to 1990, with more apartments, townhomes and two-story houses across south Everett, including Silver Lake, Holly and Cascade View. In stacked units, a leak in one apartment often reaches the ceiling and walls of the next, so the crew dries the source unit and checks every shared surface. In houses, wet carpet pad, swollen baseboards and cupped floorboards usually come out, drywall is cut above the wet line where readings stay high, and plaster is dried in place when possible.

Everett's median home was built around 1981, older than in any other city near Marysville. North Everett and downtown, in ZIP 98201, hold the oldest homes, with a median build year around 1961, and many of those houses have had kitchens, baths and plumbing replaced in stages over the years. Older neighborhoods such as Riverside, Delta and Northwest Everett sit in the north end. Farther south, 98203 dates to around 1975 on average, and 98204 and 98208 to around 1990, with more apartments, townhomes and two-story houses. Older parts of the city also have combined sewers, where storm water and sewage share the same pipes, which is why heavy rain can turn into a backup.

Everett sits along Port Gardner and the Snohomish River, about 6 miles south of Marysville across the river delta. Fall and winter atmospheric rivers bring days of heavy rain, and short, intense downpours can overwhelm older drainage: on November 15, 2016, heavy rain caused five Everett combined sewer outfalls to overflow, a sign of how storm water and sewage can back up in older areas. Roofs, gutters and lower-level drains all take a beating from November through January, when the wettest months stack one storm on top of the next.

Hard freezes are less common close to the water, but they still happen. On December 20, 2008, Everett dropped below 11 degrees, cold enough to split pipes in garages, crawlspaces and exterior walls. Older homes in the north end, where pipes may run through uninsulated spaces, tend to be the most exposed when a freeze like that returns.