It has rained since November. This morning the crawl space had a puddle in it.

Close the valve at the meter, then look under the floor

If water is still coming in from a pipe, the shutoff for most Camas homes is at the meter box near the street, and many houses have a second valve where the line enters the house. If the water is coming from outside, there is no valve to turn, so get the downspouts and the gutter overflow away from the foundation as far as you safely can. Keep clear of any room where water has reached an outlet or the panel.

Once the flow stops, the water keeps traveling. A 1930s bungalow off Fourth Avenue sits on a short crawl space, and water that goes through the fir floor lands on dirt and stays there. A 1990s house on Prune Hill has a daylight basement cut into the slope, and the uphill wall takes the runoff. Drywall wicks upward. A hardwood floor cups within days.

The provider who takes your call walks the house with a moisture meter before anyone picks up a saw. The readings, not the stains, decide which walls open.

What the crew checks in a Camas house, and what you get out of it

What happens	What it means for you
The crawl space hatch comes off early, and the crew goes under with a light and a meter	Water that dropped through the floor gets found before it softens a joist or feeds mold on the subfloor
Runoff traced to the downspout, the slope, or the footing drain before anyone dries the inside	You fix the reason the water came in, not just the puddle it left
Air movers and dehumidifiers placed by the readings, not by where the carpet looks wet	A closed-up house in a 60-inch-rain winter dries on a plan instead of on a hope
Fir and oak floors metered before a single board comes up	A cupped floor gets a drying answer before it gets a demolition answer
Photos and moisture logs kept from the first visit	Your adjuster sees dates and numbers instead of a description from memory
Drying kept separate from the rebuild	You know when the water work ends and when drywall and trim begin, and who does each

Before you haul the wet rug to the curb

Turn the water off at the meter if the leak is inside and the box is safe to reach. Open the cabinet doors under any wet sink. Lift boxes, rugs, and furniture legs off the wet floor. Take a photo of every room before anything leaves the house, and keep the pieces of a burst pipe if a plumber has already cut them out. Then call. You do not have to know whether the house needs extraction, a crawl space pump-out, or a leak search. Describe what you walked into, and the provider sorts out the rest on site.

Why Camas houses stay wet from November to March

Camas gets well over 50 inches of rain most years, and nearly all of it falls between late fall and early spring. The town began in 1883 as a mill site, and the streets below Prune Hill still hold the 1900s to 1940s bungalows that mill families built, most of them on crawl spaces with footing drains that were never designed for a wet century. Up the hill, the subdivisions built from the 1990s on sit on the flanks of an old volcanic cone, and a saturated slope in February sends water at the uphill wall of every daylight basement in the row.

The Washougal River and Lacamas Creek both meet the Columbia here, and the big river has its own record. The Vanport flood in the spring of 1948 put the Columbia at 31 feet at Vancouver, and the February 1996 flood damaged close to 300 Clark County homes and destroyed 82, a history Clark County Public Works keeps on its flood page. The cold comes from the other direction. When the Gorge east wind drops the temperature into the teens, as it did on January 13, 2024, pipes in garages and crawl spaces split across town, and the thaw is when the water shows up.

Inside the city, a rebuild that touches framing, plumbing, or wiring goes through the City of Camas Building Division. Outside the city line, in Fern Prairie or up toward Hockinson, the permit desk is Clark County Community Development, and the area pages on this site name the right one for each town.

Will my homeowners policy pay for this?

A pipe that bursts or a water heater that lets go counts as sudden damage under many homeowner policies, and those losses are often covered. Water that comes in from the ground, a creek, or a saturated slope usually falls under flood or seepage, which most standard policies exclude unless you carry a separate flood policy. Nobody who has not read your policy can tell you which side of that line you are on, and this site does not try. What the provider does is photograph every room, log moisture readings from the first visit, and write an itemized scope. Your adjuster reads that file and decides. If water is still moving, call the provider before the adjuster, because the first day's readings are the ones a claim rests on.

Nearby communities we cover, from the Columbia up to Yacolt

We serve Camas, Washougal, and Vancouver along the river, the Camas neighborhoods on Prune Hill, around Lacamas Lake, and in Grass Valley, and the unincorporated country in Fern Prairie, Hockinson, Brush Prairie, and Cape Horn. We cover Battle Ground, Ridgefield, La Center, Yacolt, and Amboy to the north, and Skamania, North Bonneville, and Stevenson up the Gorge. Every one of them is listed on the areas page.

Call (360) 226-7395 and tell us what you found. We route the call to an independent local water damage provider anywhere in Camas or the rest of Clark County.