Sewage Cleanup in Cranston, RI

It rained hard all afternoon, and around dinner you heard gurgling from the basement. When you opened the door the smell hit you first. The floor drain had pushed gray water back up across the laundry room floor, under the door to the finished side, and into the carpet. We connect you by phone with an independent local provider who cleans up sewage in Cranston, Providence, and the towns around them.

What the crew does first

The crew treats a sewer backup as contaminated water from the start. They put on protective gear, close off the affected area from the rest of the house, and pump out the standing water. Then they remove the porous materials the water touched, because carpet, pad, drywall, insulation, and cardboard cannot be cleaned once sewage has soaked in.

Once the wet material is out, they clean and disinfect the hard surfaces that stay: the concrete floor, block walls, the metal legs of the washer and dryer. They meter the framing and the floor, and drying equipment follows. The order matters. Drying first would blow contaminated air through the house.

What to do in the next hour

Keep children and pets upstairs and close the basement door. Do not wade in, and do not run a shop vacuum or a fan. If the backup is still coming, stop using water in the house: no flushing, no showers, no dishwasher, because every drain in the house feeds the same line. If a floor drain is the entry point and you can reach it safely, a plug or a heavy weight over the drain can slow it.

Take photos from the stairs. Then call us. Tell us it is a sewer backup, because that changes what the provider brings. If the whole street is backing up during a storm, the city or the Narragansett Bay Commission needs to know too, but the cleanup inside your house is the provider's job either way.

What is usually saved and what is not

Concrete, block, and stone are cleaned and disinfected in place. Framing and subfloor can often be cleaned and dried if the exposure was short. Carpet and pad that touched sewage come out. Drywall and paneling come out to a line above the water mark. Upholstered furniture, mattresses, cardboard, paper, and anything absorbent that sat in the water goes.

Hard-surfaced items such as tools, plastic bins, and metal shelving can usually be cleaned. Clothing and linens that got wet are a laundry question the crew can talk through. Once the contaminated material is gone, structural drying finishes the job the same way it would after clean water, but only after the cleaning.

Providence County notes: combined sewers, floor drains, and septic tanks

Providence, the older east side of Cranston, and parts of North Providence are served by combined sewers that carry stormwater and sewage in one pipe. In a heavy rain that pipe fills, and the lowest point in the system is often a basement floor drain in a 1920s two-family. The Narragansett Bay Commission has spent two decades building tunnels to catch those overflows, and the last phase is still under way, so backups after a storm are not rare. A backwater valve on the house line is the usual fix once the cleanup is done.

Western Cranston is different. The ranches and split-levels off Scituate Avenue and Phenix Avenue are on wells and septic systems, and a septic backup arrives through the lowest fixture in the house when the tank is full or the leach field is saturated. A wet spring like March 2010 saturated leach fields across the state. The inside cleanup is the same contaminated-water job; the tank and the field are a septic contractor's problem, and until they are fixed the house will not stay clean.

Sewer and drain backup is usually excluded from a standard homeowner policy unless you carry a rider for it, and the rider often has its own limit. Nobody on this site can tell you what your policy says. Ask the crew to photograph the entry point and the water line and to itemize what was removed. If river water came in with the backup, see basement flooding cleanup as well.

Calling about sewage cleanup

Tell us that it is sewage, where it came in, and whether it is still coming. Say how far it spread, whether the basement is finished, and whether the house is on a city sewer or a septic system. Call (401) 443-9638 now and tell us what you see.