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 Apex the first day is decided by which generation your house is. Slab subdivision homes: stop the source, photograph the wall bases and flooring edges, and get extraction called before water finishes migrating. Crawl space homes: add the under floor read, because the damage that matters may be the insulation and joists you cannot see from the kitchen. Both: the moisture map drawn in the first hours is the document the whole claim will stand on.
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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