The tide came up the street last night. This morning it is in your cellar.

Stay off the cellar stairs until the power is off down there

Salt water and a fuse box do not mix. If the water is in the cellar, cut the main breaker from upstairs if the panel is down there, or leave it alone and say so when you call. If the water came from a pipe inside the house, the main shutoff in most Newport houses is at the front foundation wall where the service comes in from the street, often behind the stairs or in the corner nearest the sidewalk. If the water came in from the harbor or up through the cellar floor, there is nothing to shut, and the job is getting it out and finding what it soaked.

A 200-year-old house does not get wet the way a new one does. The water sits on a brick or dirt floor, soaks the bottom of the sill and the first-floor joists, and wicks up through the plaster and lath on the ground floor. The salt stays behind when the water dries, and the wood keeps pulling moisture out of the air for months.

The local provider walks the cellar and the ground floor with a moisture meter before anyone pulls a board. The numbers say which walls come open and which just need air moving across them.

What the crew does in a wet Newport house, and what you get from it

What happens	What it means for you
Standing water pumped out of the cellar and off the ground floor the same day	The sill and the joists stop soaking, and the plaster stops drinking from below
Salt water, rainwater, and pipe water treated as different problems	Contaminated harbor water is handled as what it is, and clean pipe water is not over-treated
Every ground-floor wall metered at the base, plus the cellar timbers overhead	Water that ran along the sill to the far parlor is found now, not when the floor cups in spring
Original boards, plaster, and trim dried in place where the readings allow	A 1790 pine floor or horsehair plaster is not torn out because it looked wet
Air movers and dehumidifiers set by the readings, in a cellar that has never been dry	Old stone and timber dry on a schedule, not on a hope
Photos, readings, and dates logged from the first visit	Your adjuster gets a record, and a historic district review gets a record too

Before you carry the wet rugs out to the sidewalk

Get anything with legs and anything cardboard up off the wet floor. Photograph the water line on the cellar wall, the stairs, and every room on the ground floor before you move a thing. If salt water came in, do not run the furnace or a household fan across it. Then call. You do not need to know whether this is extraction, drying, or a cellar job. Say what you found, and the provider works out the rest.

Why Newport houses take water from the sea, the sky, and the ground

Newport sits on the south end of Aquidneck Island with the harbor on one side and the open Atlantic on the other, and much of what stands here was built before 1900. The Point has houses from the 1720s a few feet above the harbor. Historic Hill climbs from Thames Street on colonial and Victorian foundations of rubble fieldstone. The Fifth Ward runs along Wellington Avenue on low ground that the harbor has reached more than once. A cellar under any of these was laid up dry or with lime mortar, and it has let water through its joints for two centuries.

Then there are the storms. The hurricane of September 21, 1938 pushed a surge of 12 to 15 feet into Narragansett Bay and put Thames Street under water. Hurricane Carol did it again on August 31, 1954 and destroyed the Easton's Beach carousel. Hurricane Bob came ashore over Newport on August 19, 1991 with gusts near 100 miles an hour. Sandy on October 29, 2012 tore up the Cliff Walk and flooded downtown streets. Between the big ones, ordinary nor'easters on a full-moon tide put water on Washington Street and Wellington Avenue most winters, and the same winters bring ice dams to slate roofs and split pipes in walls that were never insulated.

The tap water here comes from a chain of surface reservoirs run by the Newport Department of Utilities, which also handles the storm drains that back up when the harbor is high. Any exterior repair on a house inside the local historic district, including a new door or clapboards after a flood, goes to the Newport Historic District Commission for a certificate of appropriateness before the work starts.

Will my homeowner policy pay for salt water in the cellar?

How the water got in decides it, and only your policy and your adjuster can answer. A burst pipe or a split radiator line is often treated as sudden damage and paid. Water that came in from the harbor or the bay is flood, and flood is a separate policy through the national program, not the homeowner policy. Groundwater seeping through a stone wall is often excluded from both. The provider photographs the cellar and the ground floor, logs the readings from day one, and writes out the scope. Your adjuster reads that and decides. This site promises nothing about what any policy pays.

Nearby communities on both sides of the bridges

We cover Newport first, from the Point and Historic Hill along the harbor to the Fifth Ward, Bellevue Avenue, Ochre Point, Ocean Drive, Kay-Catherine, the North End, and Broadway. We also cover Middletown and Portsmouth up the island, Jamestown across the Pell Bridge, Tiverton and Little Compton across the Sakonnet, and Bristol, Warren, and Barrington across the Mount Hope Bridge. Every town and neighborhood has its own page on the areas page.

Call (401) 560-5802 and tell us what is in the cellar. An independent local water damage provider serving Newport and Newport County takes it from there.