The rain has not stopped since Thanksgiving. This morning the hallway floor felt cold and soft.

Find the shutoff. Then find out whether the water is coming from above or below.

If the water came from a pipe, close the main. In most older Olympia houses it is in the crawl space near where the service line enters, or at the meter box by the sidewalk, which takes a meter key. If the water is rising under the house with no pipe involved, the ground is the source, and shutting anything off will not stop it. Either way, kill the breaker to any outlet or junction box that is sitting in water before you go down there.

A house on a crawl space does not flood the way a house on a slab does. Water pools on the dirt, wets the underside of the subfloor, and soaks the insulation between the joists so it hangs like laundry. Upstairs, the fir floors cup along the hallway and the plaster at the bottom of the walls starts to bubble. Two weeks later the house smells like a boat in February.

The local provider goes under the house with a meter and a light before anyone talks about pulling floors in an Olympia craftsman. The readings on the joists and the subfloor decide what dries in place and what comes out.

The first visit to a wet Olympia house, and what it does for you

What happens	What it means for you
Standing water pumped off the crawl space floor and out from under the joists the same day	The subfloor stops drinking from below, and the fir floor above has a chance to flatten back out
Every wall in the wet rooms metered at the baseboard, plus the joists on both sides of the hatch	Water that ran along the foundation wall to the far bedroom gets found this week, not next spring
The source named first: galvanized supply line, a ground-water seep, or a storm drain that backed up	You learn whether the next atmospheric river does this again
Air movers and dehumidifiers set by the readings, with the crawl space vents closed against the wet outside air	A cold, damp house dries on a schedule instead of on a guess
Photos, readings, and dates logged from the first hour on site	Your adjuster gets a file instead of a phone call from memory
Water work kept separate from the rebuild	You know when the drying ends and when new subfloor, plaster, and flooring begin

Before you rip up the wet floor yourself

Get rugs, boxes, and anything with legs up off the wet floor and out of the room. Photograph each room, the crawl space through the hatch, and the water line on the foundation before anything moves. Do not run the furnace if the ducts run through a wet crawl space; say so when you call. You do not have to decide whether you need extraction, drying, or a leak hunt before you call. Say what you found under the hatch, and the provider sorts out the rest.

Why Olympia houses take on water from October to March

Olympia sits at the south end of Puget Sound where the Deschutes River meets Budd Inlet, and it gets around fifty inches of rain a year, most of it between October and March. The soil under the older neighborhoods is glacial till that drains slowly, so by December the ground is saturated and every crawl space in South Capitol, Bigelow, and the Eastside sits an inch or two above the water table. The craftsman and bungalow houses there went up between 1900 and 1940, many still on their original galvanized supply lines, and those pipes pinhole and split in the coldest week of the year. The 1960s and 1980s ramblers on the west side sit on newer soil but carry their water heaters and hose bibs in unheated garages.

Then there are the storms. The atmospheric river of early December 2007 put the Chehalis River across Interstate 5 for four days and filled crawl spaces from Rochester to Tumwater. January 2009 did it again. The December 2015 and November 2021 storms saturated the whole county, and the arctic outbreaks of late December 2021 and December 2022 froze hose bibs and crawl space lines from Yelm to Shelton. Downtown, king tides now push Budd Inlet up through the storm drains onto the streets near Percival Landing several times each winter.

The city's Water Resources department runs the drinking water, storm drains, and sewer lines on the street side of the meter, and it is the right call for a storm drain that is backing up at the curb. The sewage from Olympia, Lacey, and Tumwater is treated on the downtown waterfront by the LOTT Clean Water Alliance, which is why a heavy rain and a high tide together can slow the drains in the low blocks.

Does my homeowner policy pay for a flooded crawl space?

The answer depends on how the water got there, and nobody who has not read your policy can tell you. Many policies treat a split supply line or a failed water heater as sudden damage and pay for it. Groundwater rising into a crawl space, surface water running in from the yard, and river or tidal flooding are usually excluded unless you carry a separate flood policy. The provider photographs the crawl space, logs the readings from the first visit, and writes out the scope. Your adjuster reads that and decides. Nothing on this site is a promise about what your policy will pay.

The South Sound communities we cover

We cover Olympia first, from South Capitol and Bigelow to the Westside, Ken Lake, and the Eastside. We also cover Lacey, Tumwater, Yelm, Tenino, Rainier, and Rochester across Thurston County, plus Steamboat Island, Boston Harbor, and Cooper Point on the inlets, and Shelton over the line in Mason County. Every town and neighborhood we cover is listed on the areas page.

Call (360) 364-8868 and tell us what is wet and where the water came from. An independent local water damage provider serving Olympia and Thurston County takes it from there.