Water damage is a clock, not an event. Drywall wicks moisture upward within hours. Particleboard cabinet bases swell and lose structure in about a day. Mold can start colonizing damp organic material inside 24 to 48 hours in a San Antonio summer. Almost everything that determines the size of the eventual repair happens before anyone has filed a claim.
Start with the source. If it's plumbing, shut off the supply at the fixture or at the main. If the water is near outlets, panels, or an air handler, kill the breaker to that area before walking through it. If it came in from outside during a storm, don't assume it stopped, because a saturated wall keeps releasing water into the room for hours.
Then photograph everything before you move anything. Wide shots of each affected room, then close shots of the source, the standing water, and the damaged contents. Adjusters make decisions from documentation, and the photos taken before cleanup starts are the ones that carry the most weight. Take them even if you're not sure you'll file.
Next, get the water out and the air moving, but understand the limits of a shop vac and a box fan. Surface water is the visible fraction; the rest is inside wall cavities, under cabinet toe-kicks, beneath flooring, and in the insulation above a ceiling. Professional extraction and correctly placed air movers with dehumidification reach the parts of the structure that household equipment can't, and a moisture meter is what tells you when it's actually dry.
The most expensive mistake we see is closing everything up too early. A floor that feels dry over a subfloor still holding moisture becomes a mold remediation job six weeks later, and that second job costs several times what finishing the drying would have. Drying should end when the readings say so, not when the room looks normal.
If you're in San Antonio or the surrounding area and you're standing in water right now, call us at (210) 300-4038. We answer twenty-four hours a day, the assessment is free, and getting equipment on site in the first few hours is the cheapest decision available to you.