Terms of Use

This site is published under the name Oyster Bay Water Damage and it operates as a matching service: it takes what a homeowner in the Town of Oyster Bay writes down about a water problem and puts that in front of a restoration contractor working in the same Town. It employs no technicians, owns no equipment and carries out no work on anybody's building.

This site is not taking requests yet. The form has its fields and they work, and it does not send anywhere: nothing is stored, nothing is emailed, and nobody is waiting at the other end of it.

There is nothing for a homeowner to pay for that. Where a service of this kind earns anything, it earns it from the contractor at the other end, and that has no bearing on what you are quoted or on whether you use them.

A request is a message. It is not a booking, not an instruction to start work, not an agreement to a price and not a contract with anybody. Nothing is owed by you for sending one and nothing is owed to you for having sent one.

No promise is made here that somebody will get in touch, or when. A contractor is a separate business that decides for itself which jobs it takes, and a request that nobody picks up is a real outcome rather than a fault in the service. If that happens, ringing somebody else is the right response and nothing here is designed to stop you doing it.

Any work that follows is a matter between you and the contractor: their quote, their terms, their insurance and their guarantee. This site is not party to it, does not supervise it, and cannot resolve a dispute about it. Ask them for the things you would ask any contractor for before work starts, in writing.

Send accurate information. A description that misstates what happened or where wastes the time of somebody who might otherwise have helped, and photographs of a property you have no connection with should not be sent at all.

In New York, acting for a policyholder on an insurance claim, for a fee, is public adjusting and it requires a licence. Nobody connected to this site holds one, and no licence number appears anywhere on it because there is none to publish.

So nothing here files a claim for you, negotiates one, bills an insurer, argues with an adjuster or tells you what your policy covers. There is a guide to how a New York water damage claim is usually framed, and it is written to explain the shape of the thing rather than to act in it. Your policy, your carrier and a licensed professional are where an answer about your own claim comes from.

Everything written on this site is general. It describes how water behaves in a building, how this kind of work is usually done in this part of New York, and what published bodies say about drying, mold and flood risk. No figure appears without a named publisher beside it and the day somebody last looked, which is more than most of this trade offers and still no substitute for a person standing in your basement.

None of it is legal, insurance, engineering or medical advice, and none of it is a survey of your property. If a page says a job usually goes a certain way and yours does not, yours is the one that is right.

Sources move and pages get rewritten. If a figure here has stopped matching what its publisher says, the publisher is correct and the mistake is ours.

This site links out to public bodies and their documents. Those pages belong to them, they can change or disappear without notice, and nothing here controls what is on them. A link is a pointer to where a statement came from and not an endorsement of everything else on the far side of it.

The words, pictures and layout here belong to this site. Quote a paragraph with a link back if it is useful to you; reproducing pages wholesale, or running them through a rewriter to publish elsewhere, is not on offer.

The site is offered as it is. It should be available and correct and there is no promise that it always will be, and no liability is accepted for a loss arising from relying on a page here rather than on somebody who has seen the building. That limitation goes no further than the law allows, and nothing in it affects a right you have as a consumer that cannot be signed away.

New York State law applies to these terms, and a dispute about them belongs in the New York courts. That is the state the Town sits in, and the state whose rules the rest of this page has been written against.

They can change. The date at the top is the date they were last written, and there is no notification list to be on: the current version is the one on this page. The privacy policy sits alongside these terms and covers what happens to information you send.