Newport Water Damage exists because the houses here are old, the water here is salt, and the two meet more often than anywhere else in Rhode Island. A cellar on the Point was dug before the Revolution. A three-decker in the Fifth Ward sits a few feet above the harbor. A stable on Bellevue Avenue was turned into a house in 1950 with the original slate still on the roof. When you call, we put you through to one independent local provider who works these houses across Newport, Aquidneck Island, and the East Bay every week. The provider inspects the house, writes the scope, and performs the work. Whatever you settle with them on price, schedule, or warranty is between you and them, not this site.
Most of Newport's housing stands on rubble fieldstone laid up dry or with lime mortar, with a brick or packed-dirt floor under it and no footing drain because nobody had heard of one in 1780. Groundwater comes through the joints every wet spring. Harbor water comes over the curb on a nor'easter tide and down the cellar bulkhead. Rain comes through a slipped slate or a failed valley and runs down inside a wall that was never insulated, and in January that same wall freezes the supply line inside it.
The Newport Restoration Foundation, which owns close to 80 eighteenth-century houses in the city, has documented basement and street flooding on the Point from high tides alone, and it started a national conference on the problem in 2016. Long before that, the 1938 hurricane put Thames Street under the harbor, and Carol in 1954 did the same.
The provider starts in the cellar with a flashlight and a moisture meter, not a crowbar. They check the sill and the first-floor joists from below, then go upstairs and meter the base of every ground-floor wall, comparing each reading to a wall on the second floor that stayed dry. Wide pine boards, horsehair plaster, and old trim are read before anyone decides what comes out, because most of it can be dried in place if the crew reaches it in time. Salt water changes the plan, and the provider asks where the water came from before setting equipment.
We cover Newport, Middletown, and Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island, Jamestown on Conanicut Island, Tiverton and Little Compton on the east side of the Sakonnet River, and Bristol, Warren, and Barrington up the East Bay. Every one of these towns runs its own building desk, because Rhode Island counties have no government of their own. The Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency is the state office that coordinates evacuation and shelter when a hurricane or a major coastal storm is on the way.
Providers represent their own registration and insurance. In Rhode Island, anyone doing residential construction work has to be registered with the Contractors' Registration and Licensing Board, and the board's site has a lookup where you can check a registration number in a minute. Ask the provider for a certificate of insurance and a written scope before the first board comes up, and ask which company handles the plaster and paint once the drying is finished.
Call (401) 560-5802 at any hour. Have the property address and a callback number handy, and say whether the water is salt or fresh, which floor is wet, and whether it has stopped coming in.