Water Damage Restoration
in Hickory, NC

The Foothills Water Damage Company is a locally owned restoration contractor based in Hickory, North Carolina, answering the phone 24 hours a day at (828) 471-7706. Service covers Catawba, Caldwell, Alexander and Burke Counties, including Hickory, Conover, Newton, Claremont, Maiden, Long View, Lenoir, Granite Falls, Hudson, Sawmills, Morganton, Valdese, Drexel, Hildebran, Taylorsville, Bethlehem, Hiddenite and Stony Point. Work includes emergency water extraction and structural drying, fire and smoke damage restoration, flood and groundwater cleanup, mold inspection, mold testing, mold remediation, storm damage response, and sewage and biohazard cleanup. Every job starts with a free inspection, a written scope, and moisture readings documented for your insurance carrier.

We answer the phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and dispatch from Hickory, which puts most of Catawba County inside a short drive and the rest of the four-county area within a reasonable one. Speed is not a sales line on this kind of work: the IICRC S500 standard treats the first 24 to 48 hours as the window in which clean Category 1 water degrades into contaminated Category 2 and 3 water, and it is the same window in which mold begins to colonize wet organic material. A drywall cavity dried on day one is a drying bill. The same cavity on day four is a demolition, remediation and rebuild bill.

Usually yes when the discharge was sudden and accidental, such as a burst supply line, a failed water heater, or an appliance hose letting go. Usually no when the damage came from long-term seepage, deferred maintenance, or groundwater. That last one catches people out: rising water from a river, a creek or surface flooding is excluded from a standard homeowners policy and needs separate flood coverage, generally through the National Flood Insurance Program. We are not your adjuster and we will not tell you what your policy says, but we do document the loss properly from the first visit with photographs, a written scope, and dated moisture readings, which is what a carrier actually needs to see.

North Carolina does not license or certify mold inspectors, assessors, testers or remediators at the state level. There is no state mold program to check a company against, which means anyone can print the word on a truck. Since the state will not vet a contractor for you, do it yourself: ask for current general liability insurance, ask which written standard the work follows, and ask who is analyzing the samples. Our mold work follows the IICRC S520 standard for remediation and the S500 standard for the drying that precedes it, and our testing goes to an independent accredited laboratory rather than being read in house, so nobody is grading their own homework.

For clean Category 1 water caught early and confined to one room, mitigation typically runs somewhere between $1,200 and $3,500. A loss across several rooms or a whole floor commonly lands between $4,000 and $12,000. Category 3 work, meaning sewage or groundwater, costs more because contaminated porous material has to come out and be disposed of rather than dried in place. Those figures cover mitigation and drying, not the rebuild that follows. The two variables that move a number the most are how long the water sat and how much of the wet material is porous, which is exactly why the call at hour two is cheaper than the call on day four.

Because of how houses were built here and what the summers do. Most older homes across Catawba, Caldwell, Burke and Alexander Counties sit over open-vented crawl spaces, and through a humid foothills summer those vents pull moist outside air onto framing and duct surfaces that are cooler than the dew point. The result is condensation on wood, elevated wood moisture content, and mold growth with no leak and no flooding involved. North Carolina's residential code addresses this in Section R409 covering closed crawl spaces, and the state requires a permit for converting a vented crawl space to a closed one. We check crawl spaces on nearly every mold inspection we run, because that is where the problem usually starts.

We serve Catawba, Caldwell, Alexander and Burke Counties from our Hickory base, which together make up the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton metropolitan area. Catawba County includes Hickory, Conover, Newton, Claremont, Maiden, Long View, Brookford, Catawba, Sherrills Ford and Terrell. Caldwell County includes Lenoir, Granite Falls, Hudson, Sawmills, Gamewell, Cajah's Mountain and Rhodhiss. Burke County includes Morganton, Valdese, Drexel, Hildebran, Rutherford College, Connelly Springs, Glen Alpine and Icard. Alexander County includes Taylorsville, Bethlehem, Hiddenite and Stony Point. If your address sits just outside that line, call and we will tell you straight away rather than waste your time.

Shut the water off at the main if the source is plumbing. Kill power at the breaker to any circuit feeding a wet area, and do not walk into standing water where power may still be live. Move what you can lift to a dry floor, and get furniture legs up off wet carpet before the finish bleeds into it. Do not run a household shop vacuum on anything that might be sewage or groundwater, and do not point a box fan at a wet wall cavity, which mostly spreads spores around. Photograph everything before it is touched, because that is what your carrier will ask for. Then call us at (828) 471-7706.