Contractors just flooded my upstairs while replacing water heater, it’s raining in my kitchen- what to expect next?

[u/HumanistPeach]

So our water heater died this weekend. The repair guys just came over today, and promptly flooded all the water that was inside the old broken water heater onto my upstairs floor (carpeted), and there was so much that it immediately started pouring from my kitchen ceiling out of two hanging light fixtures. It definitely spread quite a bit, because there are two patches in the drywall that were invisible before that are now obvious, and the seams of at least two sheets of drywall are showing/swollen with water. We’ve already put the business’s insurance in touch with our homeowner’s insurance, and my boyfriend does all the IT for this company, so I’m not worried about them trying to screw us over, I’m more just looking to see how long I should except repairs to take, what the potential repairs might be, etc. TYIA!

[u/fuku89]

Faulty valve? If the valve was faulty, then the heater wouldn’t have stopped draining. And I’m not talking about drip, drip, drip faulty. That doesn’t soak a floor, part of the walls and send water cascading to the floor below.

Incompetence or inattention is to blame.

[u/pokerbrowni → u/fuku89]

Well, if you have a 40 gallon tank, and a 10 gallon shopvac and then you open the drain valve and it breaks in the open position, I could see a problem. But that seems a little unlikely. Even more so the idea that no one thought to "stick a finger it it" until the problem was solved.

[u/KFCConspiracy → u/pokerbrowni]

The water's kind of hot, so stick a finger in it would kind of burn you....

[u/pokerbrowni → u/KFCConspiracy]

Most people I know turn off the water heater's heating element then run 10-15 gallons of cold water into it so they aren't working with 120 degree water when draining the system.

[u/huffleshuffle → u/pokerbrowni]

Those people don't flood houses