Your plumbing after a storm or power outage: what to check

Severe storms in North Alabama tend to come in two stretches, a busy one in spring and a second one in late fall, and both can knock out power for hours. City water usually keeps flowing during an outage, since your faucets don’t need electricity. What needs checking is your water heater, your well pump if you have one, and anything hit by a fallen tree or floodwater.

While the power’s out, what still works?

A gas water heater with a standing pilot light will usually keep making hot water right through an outage, since the pilot doesn’t need electricity to burn. Power-vent models, heaters with electronic ignition, and every tankless unit are different. They need electricity, so no power means no hot water.

An electric tank heater stops heating the moment the power drops, but the tank holds a good amount of heat for hours if you go easy on the hot water. A well pump stops outright, so if you’re on well water, expect the taps to go dry once the pressure tank empties. A sump pump stops too, which matters most if the storm is also dumping rain on a basement or crawlspace. If you’ve got a generator, the sump pump is one of the smarter things to run off it during a long outage.

If a tree came down in the yard

A falling tree doesn’t need to hit the house to cause plumbing damage. Roots and trunks can crack a buried water line or sewer line on their way down or as the root ball shifts afterward. Watch for a soft, soggy patch of yard that wasn’t there before, water pooling somewhere it shouldn’t, or a sewer smell near where the tree fell. None of those are urgent the way a flooded room is, but they’re worth a call soon, because a cracked line keeps leaking whether you see it or not.

If anything was underwater

If your water heater or any gas appliance sat in floodwater, even briefly, don’t turn it back on. Water can get into burner assemblies, controls, and insulation in ways you can’t see from the outside, and running it anyway risks a lot more than a repair bill. Have it checked before it’s used again, and plan on replacing anything that was fully submerged.

Smell gas? Leave the house and call the gas company or 911 from outside. Don’t flip a light switch, don’t check it yourself, and don’t go back in until someone tells you it’s clear.

When the power comes back on

Check the breaker for your electric water heater once power returns. Someone may have flipped it off during the outage as a precaution and forgotten it. If the water stayed on the whole time, the tank should still be full, so it’s safe to restore power right away. If the water was ever off too, hold off on power to that unit until you’ve confirmed the tank’s full. An electric heating element running in an empty tank burns out fast.

Boil water notices sometimes follow

A storm that damages water mains or knocks out treatment plant power can lead to a boil water notice from your utility, even in parts of town that never lost water pressure. If one gets issued for your address, here’s what to do once it’s lifted, including flushing your lines and dealing with your ice maker.

If a pipe lets go once the water’s back on, here’s what to do in the first minutes. For anything actively flooding, you can call us any time, and our emergency plumbing page covers what to do before we get there.