Cinco Ranch is one of the closest communities to our Katy staging area, so it is among the fastest arrivals we make. It also sits in a part of west Houston with a flood risk that mapped flood zones do not fully describe, and that is worth understanding before you need us rather than after.
What we actually get called for here
Most Cinco Ranch losses are ordinary and covered. January freezes burst hose bibs and the supply lines running through unconditioned attic space above garages. Summer brings AC condensate backups, where a clogged drain line quietly feeds weeks of water into ceiling drywall before a stain ever shows. The 1990s and 2000s sections produce slab leaks as decades of seasonal movement in expansive clay work on rigid connections. Spring hail takes roofs and windows.
None of that is flood. All of it is the standard covered peril under a Texas homeowners policy.
The Barker Reservoir flood pool
The part that is not ordinary is worth stating plainly, because a lot of Cinco Ranch owners learned it the hard way.
The Addicks and Barker Reservoirs exist to hold stormwater back from downtown Houston. In the decades after they were built, development was permitted inside the reservoir basins, and roughly 14,000 homes now sit within them. A flood pool is the land a reservoir uses to store water during an extreme event. It is a different thing from a mapped 100-year floodplain, and a property can sit outside the floodplain and inside the flood pool at the same time.
During Hurricane Harvey, water pooling behind the dams and the controlled releases that followed put water into thousands of Katy-area homes that were not in any mapped flood zone. Parts of Cinco Ranch were among the neighborhoods affected, alongside Kelliwood and Canyon Gate. Many of those owners did not know their property sat inside a flood pool until the water was in it.
Texas law changed as a result. Senate Bill 339 took effect September 1, 2019, and the statutory seller’s disclosure notice now asks whether a property lies wholly or partly within a 500-year floodplain, a flood pool, or a reservoir. Before that date, the disclosure requirement covered only the 100-year floodplain. If you bought before September 2019, no one was legally required to tell you.
What to do with that information
Two practical conclusions, and they point in different directions.
First: if your property is inside a flood pool, that is an argument for carrying flood insurance. Reservoir pooling is flood. A homeowners policy excludes it, and NFIP or private flood coverage is the only thing that responds.
Second, and more often relevant: the flood pool has nothing to do with the burst pipe in your wall. The great majority of what we respond to in Cinco Ranch starts inside the house, and those losses are covered by your homeowners policy regardless of what the flood map says. Do not let “I’m in the reservoir pool” talk you out of filing on a supply-line failure. Where the water started determines the peril.
Read our insurance claims walkthrough before deciding not to file. The West Houston Homeowner’s Guide to Water Damage and Insurance Claims covers Texas Insurance Code Chapter 542 prompt-pay deadlines, actual cash value versus replacement cost, and recoverable depreciation in full.
What to do in the first hour
- Shut the water off at the main if the source is inside the house.
- Photograph and video everything before you move anything. It takes four minutes and it is worth more on a claim than anything else you will do that day.
- Call us. Mitigation satisfies your policy’s duty to prevent further damage.
- Then open the claim. Chapter 542 deadlines run from notice.
- Do not sign an Assignment of Benefits. We never ask for one.
Do not run household fans across standing water and call it dry. Air movement without dehumidification relocates moisture into wall cavities and framing rather than removing it from the building, and it is the single most common reason we get called to a house someone already tried to dry themselves.
Getting to you in Cinco Ranch
Cinco Ranch is one of the closest runs from our Katy staging area, so it sits at the fast end of our range. The truck rolls within five minutes of your call and typical response is 25 to 45 minutes across the service area.
The phone is answered around the clock by the crew on rotating on-call shifts rather than an answering service, and the crew is bilingual in English and Spanish. We are IICRC certified in Water Damage Restoration and Applied Structural Drying, we bill carriers directly and write estimates in Xactimate, and the same crew that runs the demolition handles the rebuild. Estimates are free.
We also serve Katy, Fulshear, Cypress, and Sugar Land.