Before anything else. If you smell gas, do not call a plumber. Get out of the house, and from outside, call the city gas utility. Long Beach is unusual: it runs its own municipal gas system rather than sitting in SoCalGas territory, so the emergency number you want is the city’s, and their crew will come and make it safe. A plumber is who you call afterward, to fix what caused it. That order matters and people get it backward.
Everything below assumes water, not gas.
First, turn the water off
Almost every plumbing emergency stops being an emergency the moment the water stops. If a supply line under a sink or behind a toilet has let go, there is an angle stop right there on the wall. Turn it clockwise. If the leak is somewhere you cannot isolate, go out to the meter box in the parkway strip, lift the lid, and shut the main.
Here is the part that catches Long Beach homeowners specifically, and it is worth reading now rather than at midnight. A lot of the older housing here, the pre-war bungalows around Rose Park and California Heights and the streets off Fourth, still has an original gate valve at the house shutoff. Gate valves seize. They sit untouched for forty years, and then on the one night you need it, the handle spins freely and nothing happens, or the stem snaps off in your hand. Go and try yours this weekend. If it does not turn easily, have it swapped for a quarter-turn ball valve, which is a small, cheap, unexciting job that will one day save you a floor.
What is actually an emergency
Sewage coming up through the lowest drain in the house, a shower pan or a floor drain, is a real emergency and it will not improve on its own. It usually means the lateral out to the main is blocked, and in this city those laterals are old, brittle, and sitting in ground that has shifted for a century between the Newport-Inglewood fault and the long slow subsidence over the Wilmington oil field. Every fixture you run makes it worse. Stop using water and call.
A burst supply line that you cannot isolate is an emergency, for obvious reasons.
A water heater venting badly, or one that is spilling combustion products back into a closet, is an emergency, and it is a carbon monoxide question rather than a plumbing one.
What is not, whatever the after-hours ad says
A slab leak is serious and it needs attention this week. It is almost never worth an after-hours callout, because nobody is opening a slab at 2am, and the diagnostic work needs daylight and equipment. Shut the water off at the main, live off it until morning, and pay the day rate.
A single slow drain is not an emergency. A dripping faucet is not an emergency. A toilet that runs is a flapper, and it is a four-dollar part.
We will lose money by telling you this, and we are going to tell you anyway: emergency callouts in Long Beach are commonly priced at one and a half to two times the standard rate, and a great many of the calls that come in after eleven at night could have waited until seven in the morning at no cost to anybody but the homeowner’s sleep. The question to ask yourself is not whether the problem is bad. It is whether the problem is getting worse right now with the water shut off. If it is not, it can wait.
While you wait
Photograph everything, before you clean anything up. If there is a claim later, the photographs taken in the first ten minutes are worth more than anything you can reconstruct afterward.
Get the water moving away from drywall and out of cabinets. Pull what you can out of the path of it. If it is a sewage backup, keep people and pets away from the water, and do not run so much as a bathroom tap anywhere in the house.
Questions
Is a backed-up sewer the city’s problem or mine?
Nearly always yours. The city maintains the main in the street. The lateral running from your house out to that main is a homeowner responsibility, and that is where the blockage almost always is. If a plumber cameras the line and finds the obstruction is actually in the city main, that changes things, and that is exactly why you camera it rather than guess.
Will homeowners insurance cover this?
Sudden and accidental damage, often. A pipe that has been weeping quietly behind a wall for eight months, usually not, because insurers treat that as maintenance you did not do. We are not your insurer and cannot promise you anything here. Take the photographs, keep the invoice, and ask them.
How fast can someone actually get here?
Depends on the hour and what else is running. Anyone who promises you a specific number of minutes sight unseen is selling, not scheduling.
Get a Long Beach plumber out
Tell us what is happening and whether you have managed to get the water shut off. If the honest answer is that this can wait until morning and save you a premium, that is what you will hear.
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