What to Do When a Pipe Bursts

By the Westminster Emergency Plumber team · Updated September 2026

Shut the Water Off First

Everything else can wait. Go to the main shutoff valve and close it. In most homes around here that valve is in the basement or crawl space, on the wall where the supply line comes in through the front of the house, usually within a few feet of the water meter. Turn it clockwise until it stops. If it is a lever, turn it a quarter turn so it sits across the pipe rather than along it.

If the valve will not budge, do not force it hard enough to snap the stem. Try the shutoff closest to the leak instead: under a sink, behind a toilet, or on the cold line feeding the water heater. If none of those work, call the water utility and ask them to close the curb stop at the street.

Once the water is off, open the lowest faucet in the house and an outside tap if it is not frozen. That drains what is left in the pipes so it stops feeding the break.

Stay Away From the Risky Spots

Water and electricity are the part of this that hurts people. Do not walk into standing water that has reached an electrical panel, a furnace, a water heater or a wall outlet, and do not run an extension cord through it. If the water has reached any of those and you cannot shut the power off from a dry spot, stay out and say so when you call.

If you can smell gas anywhere near the water, leave the house and call the gas utility from outside. Do not switch anything on or off on your way out. Gas equipment sitting in water is not something to investigate yourself.

Protect What You Can

With the water off and nothing electrical in play, move what you can out of the way. Lift boxes and furniture off a wet floor, pull rugs back, and get anything paper or fabric up onto something dry. In a finished basement, water wicks up into drywall and soaks carpet pad quickly, so clearing a path matters more than mopping.

Take photographs as you go. A few pictures of where the water is, how deep it is and what it has reached are worth having later, and they cost nothing to take now.

Do Not Try to Thaw or Patch It

If the pipe froze, resist the urge to warm it aggressively. Warming the room around a frozen line is reasonable. An open flame, a torch or a heat gun held against a pipe is not, and it is a genuine fire risk inside a wall cavity. Once a line has already split, warming it only lets more water out.

Tape and clamps sold as emergency patches are not a repair. They sometimes slow a drip long enough to get through a night, and they can also blow off under pressure when the water comes back on. Leave the pipe alone and let it stay dry.

What the Repair Visit Involves

The plumber starts by finding the actual break, which is often not where the wet patch is. Water runs along joists and pipe runs before it drops, so a stain in a hallway ceiling can come from a split several feet away. Once the break is located, the repair depends on the material and the access: a section of copper in an open basement ceiling is straightforward, while the same split inside a finished wall means agreeing how the access is opened first.

Ask two things before work starts. What exactly is being replaced, and what happens to the pipe either side of it? Copper that split once from freezing has usually been stressed on both sides of the break, and a good repair accounts for that rather than patching one inch. Our burst pipe repair page sets out what a visit covers.

Bursts Around Westminster

The pipes that fail here are the ones that get cold: runs inside exterior walls, lines crossing over an unheated garage, anything in a crawl space, and the supply to an outdoor hose bib that never got disconnected before the first hard freeze. The Arctic cold snap in December 2022 produced a lot of calls across the north metro, and in most of those houses the water did not appear until the ice began to thaw.

Split-level and tri-level homes deserve a particular mention, because the layout puts plumbing in outside walls and above unheated space. If you live in one, read the local notes on emergency plumbing in Thornton, where that style of house is everywhere.

Arrange an Inspection

Once the water is off and everyone is clear of it, call. Westminster Emergency Plumber can locate the break, explain the repair and price it before anything is cut. If water keeps appearing after the obvious split is fixed, leak detection tracks down the rest. If the source turns out to be the water heater rather than a pipe, the repair versus replacement comparison explains that decision. See how a service call works before you book.