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When disaster strikes your business premises, the first 60 minutes are critical. What you do — and don't do — in that window directly affects the total damage, the restoration timeline and the strength of your insurance claim. Panic is natural, but a clear set of actions will save you thousands and potentially weeks of lost trading.
Evacuate staff, customers and anyone on the premises immediately. If there is standing water, do not walk through it if there is any chance it is in contact with electrical wiring or appliances. Account for everyone and move to a safe assembly point outside the building. If the building is structurally compromised — visible cracks, sagging ceiling, smoke — do not re-enter until cleared by emergency services.
If you can safely reach your electrical switchboard, turn off the mains. For water damage, shut off the water supply at the mains stopcock. For gas, turn off the gas meter if you smell gas or suspect a leak. These actions stop the source and prevent secondary damage — a burst pipe that runs for another hour can double the damage footprint.
Before you move anything, photograph and video the damage from multiple angles. Capture the full extent: ceilings, walls, floors, stock, equipment, documents. Use your phone's timestamp feature. This evidence is critical for your insurance claim and for any tenant–landlord discussions about liability. Photograph serial numbers on damaged equipment where possible.
Move high-value stock, electronics, paper documents and irreplaceable items to a dry, unaffected area. If water is still entering, use towels, tarpaulins or anything available to divert flow away from critical assets. Cover equipment with plastic sheeting. Every item you protect now is one less item on your insurance claim and one less thing to replace before you can reopen.
Lodge an emergency claim online. A recovery coordinator will review the claim and connect you with an IICRC-certified contractor from the national NRPG network, available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The contractor begins emergency make-safe on arrival: water extraction, containment, drying equipment deployment and structural assessment. Work starts without waiting for insurer approval.
If you are a tenant, notify your landlord or managing agent as soon as possible. Most leases require prompt notification of damage. Send a written message (email or text) with your photos and a description of what happened. This creates a paper trail. Do not wait for the landlord to act before engaging a restoration company — delay causes more damage and more cost for everyone.
Lodge your claim as early as possible. Have your policy number, the date and time of the event, your initial photos and a brief description of the damage ready. If you have both building and contents insurance, you may need to lodge separate claims. Your broker can guide you. We provide all the documentation your insurer will need — but the initial notification should come from you.
One of the most stressful parts of commercial disaster recovery is working out who is responsible for what. As a tenant, you may feel caught between your landlord, the body corporate and your own insurer. Here is how responsibility typically falls — though your specific lease may vary.
Structural elements of the building — walls, roof, floors, plumbing, common stairwells and the building envelope — are generally covered by the landlord's building insurance policy. If a pipe bursts inside a wall cavity and damages the slab, that is usually the landlord's claim. The landlord's insurer will typically appoint their own contractors, though this process can take days or weeks.
Everything you brought into the premises — your stock, equipment, furniture, signage, shelving, computer systems and any fit-out you installed — is your responsibility under your contents or business insurance policy. This is the most common area where business owners are underinsured. If you have spent $100,000 on a kitchen fit-out, your contents policy needs to reflect that.
If your business operates within a strata scheme, damage to common property (lobbies, car parks, shared corridors, external walls) is the body corporate's responsibility under their strata insurance policy. You may still need to coordinate with the strata manager, particularly if the source of damage is in a common area but the effect is in your tenancy.
Your lease may contain specific clauses about maintenance, repairs and damage notification. Some leases require you to maintain certain fixtures. Some give the landlord the right to choose contractors. Some require you to carry specific insurance minimums. Review your lease — or have your solicitor review it — as part of your recovery process. But do this in parallel with the restoration, not instead of it.
This is the most important point: do not delay restoration while you argue about who pays. Every hour of delay causes more damage. Mould begins growing within 24–48 hours of water damage. Smoke residue from fire permanently etches glass and metal surfaces within days. The additional damage caused by delay will cost far more than the initial response — and neither landlord nor tenant benefits from a worse outcome.
We bill whoever engages us — the business owner, the tenant, the landlord or the property manager. We do not get involved in tenant–landlord disputes about who should ultimately bear the cost. Our job is to restore your premises as fast as possible and provide the documentation both parties need for their respective insurance claims. If you are the tenant and you engage us, we bill you directly, and you claim reimbursement from your insurer.
Business interruption (BI) insurance is one of the most valuable — and most under-claimed — components of a commercial policy. It covers the revenue you lose while your premises is out of action. But to claim it, you need meticulous documentation. This is where many business owners fall short, and where we provide significant value.
BI cover generally reimburses your net profit plus ongoing fixed expenses (rent, loan repayments, permanent staff wages, insurance premiums) for the period your business cannot trade. Some policies also cover increased costs of working — for example, the cost of temporary premises or equipment hire to keep partial operations running. Your indemnity period (the maximum time the insurer will cover) is defined in your policy — check it now, before you need it.
A successful BI claim requires a clear timeline and supporting evidence. Your insurer will typically ask for:
We provide a comprehensive documentation package specifically designed to support insurance claims:
This documentation package is provided as part of your restoration — you do not need to request it separately. It is designed to give your insurer and loss adjuster everything they need without follow-up requests that delay your reimbursement.
While we handle the physical restoration documentation, you need to handle the financial side. Start a daily log from the moment the event occurs:
From the moment the disaster occurs, keep a written log of every conversation, every phone call, every cost and every decision. Include dates, times and the names of people you spoke to. This log is admissible evidence and is invaluable if there is a dispute with your insurer about the claim timeline, the scope of damage or the period of interruption. Use your phone's notes app and back it up to the cloud daily.
For many businesses — retail shops, warehouses, restaurants, pharmacies — the stock on the premises represents tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in value. What can be saved, what must be written off and how you document the difference has a direct impact on your insurance outcome and your recovery speed.
The answer depends on the type of damage, the type of stock and how quickly salvage begins. Hard goods (metal tools, glass, sealed plastics) can often be cleaned and restored. Soft goods (textiles, paper, upholstered furniture) are more difficult — water-damaged fabric can be cleaned if treated within 24–48 hours, but mould contamination usually means a write-off. Electronics depend on whether power was running at the time of water exposure. If an item was powered on and got wet, it is almost certainly damaged beyond economical repair.
Some stock categories have zero tolerance for delay:
Before you dispose of anything, photograph it. Photograph every damaged item individually where practical, and in bulk where not (for example, a pallet of water-damaged cartons). Record the quantity, description and approximate replacement value. Your insurer needs this evidence to assess your contents claim — if you dispose of stock without documentation, you may not be reimbursed.
If you have a POS system or inventory management system, export your current stock levels before the disaster (or as close to the event date as possible). This becomes your baseline for calculating loss.
Your insurance policy may cover replacement cost (what it costs to buy new) or indemnity value (the current value of the item, accounting for depreciation). Check your policy wording. For high-value items like commercial kitchen equipment, refrigeration units or specialised machinery, the difference between replacement cost and indemnity value can be significant. If your policy pays replacement cost, it may be more cost-effective to claim a write-off than to pay for restoration of a partially damaged item.
Our contractors are trained to work alongside you during the initial assessment to categorise stock into salvageable and non-salvageable. We photograph and document everything as part of our standard process. For commercial restoration projects, we can coordinate with specialist services — document drying, electronics recovery, cold storage for perishable goods — to maximise what can be saved and minimise your claim.
This is ultimately what matters: reopening your doors and returning to revenue. Every decision we make — from the initial response to the final sign-off — is driven by one question: what gets this business trading again as fast as possible, without compromising the quality of the restoration?
Every situation is different, but here is a general timeline for a commercial water damage restoration:
For smaller incidents (a single room, localised leak), you could be back trading within 48–72 hours. For major events (full floor flooding, fire damage), the timeline extends accordingly — but we give you a clear schedule from Day 1 so you can plan.
Wherever possible, we work to keep unaffected areas of your business operational. We use physical containment barriers, negative air pressure systems and dust management to isolate the restoration zone from the trading zone. If your shop front is unaffected but your storeroom is flooded, you may be able to keep serving customers while we work behind the scenes. We assess this on arrival and discuss options with you immediately.
If your entire premises is uninhabitable, you may need to operate from a temporary location. Consider:
The faster you make these decisions, the less revenue you lose. We give you a realistic timeline on Day 1 so you can make informed choices about whether to relocate or wait.
Depending on your industry, you may need clearance certificates before reopening. Food businesses require health and safety sign-off. Childcare centres need specific air quality certification. Medical practices must meet infection control standards. Our IICRC-certified contractors understand these requirements and ensure the restoration meets the applicable Australian Standards. We provide completion certificates that satisfy both your insurer and your regulatory body.
We understand the pressure to reopen. But cutting corners on restoration — reopening before drying targets are met, painting over moisture, skipping mould checks — leads to problems that are far more expensive to fix later. Our approach is aggressive timelines with rigorous quality checks. We use data-driven drying (daily moisture readings, psychrometric monitoring) to push the process as fast as the physics allow, while ensuring the restoration is complete and will not fail within months.
Navigating the insurance process after a disaster is one of the most frustrating parts of recovery. You are already dealing with damage, lost revenue and operational disruption — the last thing you need is weeks of back-and-forth with your insurer before work can even begin. Our billing model eliminates that delay entirely.
This is the single most important thing to understand about how we work: we bill you directly — the business owner or tenant. We do not bill your insurance company, and we do not wait for your insurer to approve the scope of works before starting. This means work begins immediately. No waiting for a loss adjuster to visit. No waiting for scope negotiations between your insurer and a panel contractor. No two-week delay while paperwork moves between departments.
Because you are our client — not the insurance company — you control the restoration. You decide the priority areas, you approve the scope, and you set the timeline expectations. There are no scope disputes between us and an insurer that leave your premises half-restored while they negotiate. You get the restoration you need, when you need it.
We provide everything your insurer needs to process your reimbursement claim:
You submit this documentation package to your insurer as part of your claim. Because our documentation is thorough and IICRC-compliant, it satisfies the evidence requirements insurers look for. This reduces the chance of your claim being disputed or delayed. For more detail on the insurance claims process, see our Emergency Make-Safe Guide.
The initial emergency make-safe service costs $2,750. This is broken down as:
After the emergency make-safe is complete, your contractor will provide a formal scope of works and contract for the full restoration. This contract includes clear terms, conditions and pricing before any further work proceeds.
Commercial restorations can run into tens of thousands of dollars. If you need to spread the cost while waiting for your insurance reimbursement, payment plans are available through Equipped Commercial Finance. This allows you to get the restoration done now and manage cash flow while your insurer processes the claim. Many business owners find this particularly useful because insurance reimbursement can take 30–90 days, and you cannot afford to wait that long to restore your premises and resume trading.
The most common questions we receive from business owners and commercial tenants during a disaster recovery situation.
Ensure everyone is safe and evacuate the premises if necessary. Turn off the electricity at the mains if you can reach the switchboard safely. Do not walk through standing water that may be in contact with electrical sources. Once safe, photograph and video the damage immediately — before you touch anything. Then lodge a claim online at disasterrecovery.com.au/claim for emergency response as soon as a certified contractor is confirmed for your area.
It depends on your lease and the type of damage. Generally, the landlord's building insurance covers structural damage (walls, ceilings, floors, plumbing). The tenant's contents or business insurance covers stock, fit-out, equipment and personal property. In strata buildings, the body corporate covers common areas. However, you should act first to prevent further damage and sort out liability afterwards — delay only makes things worse and more expensive.
Our emergency response arrives as soon as a certified contractor is confirmed for your area, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The full restoration timeline depends on the extent of damage, but we prioritise commercial properties because we understand that every day closed is revenue lost. For many water damage incidents, we can have you partially trading again within 24–48 hours while restoration continues in affected areas.
We provide a comprehensive documentation package: timestamped before, during and after photographs; moisture mapping and readings; a detailed scope of works; restoration timeline; materials and equipment logs; and a completion certificate. This package is designed to support your business interruption claim and give your insurer everything they need to process your reimbursement.
In many cases, yes. We assess whether unaffected areas can remain operational while we work on damaged sections. We use containment barriers, negative air pressure and noise management to minimise disruption. If the entire premises needs to be closed, we will give you a clear timeline so you can make arrangements — whether that means temporary relocation, redirecting customers, or notifying suppliers.
We bill you directly — the business owner or tenant — not your insurer. This is actually a significant advantage: it means work starts immediately without waiting for insurer approval, loss adjuster visits or scope negotiations. We provide full documentation so you can submit our invoices to your insurer for reimbursement. Payment plans are also available through Equipped Commercial Finance for larger restorations.
The emergency make-safe fee is $2,750. This breaks down as $550 for the Disaster Recovery platform fee and $2,200 held for the attending contractor. This covers the initial emergency response: securing the premises, stopping the source of damage, extracting standing water, setting up drying equipment and preventing further loss. After make-safe, your contractor provides a formal scope of works and contract for the full restoration.
Have a question not answered here? Lodge an emergency claim or visit our business hub for more resources.
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Every hour your business is closed costs you money. We respond as soon as a certified contractor is confirmed for your area, 24/7, anywhere in Australia — and give you full documentation for your insurance claim.
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