Richmond is the Fort Bend County seat and it sits on a bend of the Brazos, which makes it the one city we serve where the river is a genuine part of the conversation rather than a background detail. That has a specific consequence for insurance that Richmond homeowners get wrong more than anyone else on our service map.
The Brazos, and the three record years
Richmond took three consecutive record river floods. The Brazos crested near 54.7 feet at Richmond in late May 2016 after record rainfall, with roughly a thousand people evacuated across Fort Bend County. Then Harvey pushed it past that mark to 55.19 feet on August 31, 2017. At the peak of Harvey, close to 22 percent of Fort Bend County was under water and more than 5,000 people were rescued.
Nothing about that history is a reason to panic and it is not the risk profile of every Richmond address. Flood zone designations vary parcel by parcel, and the current FEMA map for your specific lot is the only reliable answer for your house. What the history does mean is that Richmond homeowners have unusually strong instincts about river flooding, and those instincts lead them to the wrong conclusion about ordinary water losses.
The distinction that costs Richmond homeowners the most money
Here is the part worth reading twice, because we watch people get it backwards on the phone.
- Water that starts outside and rises into the structure is flood. River overflow, surface water, and bayou backwater are excluded by every standard homeowners policy. Covering that requires a separate NFIP or private flood policy.
- Water that starts inside the house is not flood. A burst supply line, a failed water heater, an overflowing washing machine, a cracked AC condensate pan, a sewer backup on your own lateral. These are sudden and accidental losses, and they are the standard covered peril under a Texas homeowners policy.
The mistake goes like this. A Richmond homeowner has a supply line let go in a wall, sees water across the floor, remembers 2016 and 2017, concludes “this is flooding and I do not have flood insurance,” and never files. That is money left on the table, and quite a lot of it. Where the water started is what determines the peril, not how much of it there is or how much it looks like the last flood.
The newer master-planned sections change the mix too. Aliana, Harvest Green, Long Meadow Farms, and Veranda are recent enough that a good share of what we see there is new-construction supply-line and fitting failure rather than anything to do with the river. If your home is only a few years old, the builder’s warranty may still be in play alongside the insurance claim, which we cover in detail on the Fulshear page.
Read our insurance claims walkthrough before you decide 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.
Sewage backups near the river
The older neighborhoods closer to the river have older sanitary infrastructure, and heavy rain events can push backups through floor drains and low fixtures. Sewage is Category 3 water under IICRC S500, which is a different job from a clean-water loss: it requires containment, removal rather than drying of porous materials that were contacted, and full decontamination. Do not run a wet vac over it and do not try to save contacted carpet. See sewage cleanup for how that work actually runs.
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. Four minutes of documentation is worth more on a claim than anything else you can do.
- 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.
If the water came from the river rather than from inside the house, document it exactly the same way. The documentation serves a flood claim just as well.
Getting to you in Richmond
The truck rolls within five minutes of your call, and typical response is 25 to 45 minutes from our Katy staging 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 Sugar Land, Fulshear, Katy, and Houston.