The number is (805) 427-9039, and this is what happens once you dial it.
SOS Restoration of Ventura County answers (805) 427-9039 around the clock for sewage, storm damage, mold, fire and smoke, water, and the reconstruction that follows any of them, across all ten cities from Oxnard to Ojai and the unincorporated ground between them. The same crew stops the damage, dries the building, and rebuilds whatever had to be cut away.
One call covers both halves of the job. The first half is the emergency: killing the source, pulling the water out, setting drying equipment, cleaning what smoke or sewage touched, and removing what is already gone. The second half is putting the house back together, which means framing, insulation, board, texture, paint, doors and trim, cabinets, counters and flooring. Mitigation runs under IICRC #70194273 and the rebuild runs under CSLB #1131134, so nobody hands you off halfway and tells you to go hire a builder.
Residential and commercial, both, and the people who tear out are the people who put it back. If nothing has happened yet and you are reading ahead, the home page walks the whole sequence in order. If it is happening around you as you read this, stop reading and dial.
Can't call right now? Send it and we call you.
Your phone number is the only thing we really need. Everything else just helps us send the right crew with the right equipment.
Is anybody actually awake at this hour?
Yes, and the useful part is the four minutes after that, not the fact that the line opened.
Our dispatcher works through the same short list every time: whether water is still arriving, whether the power is live in that room, what the water came out of, and who is asleep in the building. Those four answers decide what our nearest crew loads before it pulls out. The line does not close for a weekend or a holiday, because a supply line under a sink does not check a calendar. Water heaters let go with the house empty, pipes split in the first cold snap of the year, and the phone runs hardest on the first serious rain of the season, when every hillside that burned in the last few years starts moving at once.
No menu, and no form promising that somebody will reach out.
My hands are full and the water is still coming. What do I say first?
The city and the nearest cross street. Everything else can wait until your hands are free.
That much is enough to start our nearest crew moving. Then four things, in whatever order they come out.
- Is it still running? If you have not found the shutoff, stay on the line. We will work out where yours is while somebody is already heading your way.
- Is the power on where the water is? Ceiling fixtures, outlets near the floor, a panel in a wet garage. If it is and the water is deep, we will tell you to stay out of that room.
- What is it? Clean supply water, rain, or something that came back up a drain. Sewage changes the protective gear, the disposal, and what can be saved.
- Who is in the building? A baby, somebody pregnant, an elderly parent, anybody with asthma. That changes where we set containment and which rooms we tell people to sleep in.
Nobody will ask for a policy number, a card, or a deposit to get a crew moving. Those conversations belong later, at a table, with paper.
Will somebody come out just to tell me how bad it is?
Yes, and no bill follows that visit.
The technician on site carries a moisture meter through the rooms and reads the walls and subfloor you were sure were fine. Drywall wicks upward and carpet pad hides everything, so the wet line is almost never where the stain is. You learn which materials are saturated, then send our crew away owing nobody a dollar.
It also settles the question people are really asking, which is whether this is a job at all. A moldy patch under roughly ten square feet, call it three feet by three feet, is usually a homeowner with gloves and one free weekend. Past that size, or anywhere the growth is feeding on water still arriving, you want the room sealed off, a machine holding it at lower pressure than the hallway so nothing drifts into the rooms you still use, and somebody who can prove where the moisture came from.
Do you come to my town, or only to the big ones?
The service area is the county, not a circle drawn around an office.
All ten incorporated cities are covered: Oxnard, Ventura, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Moorpark, Port Hueneme, Santa Paula, Fillmore and Ojai. So is the unincorporated ground stitched between them, which is where a surprising share of the hard jobs are: Piru, Somis, Saticoy, El Rio, Oak View, Meiners Oaks, La Conchita, the ranch parcels off the two-lane roads that nobody drives unless they live there.
Neighborhoods and ZIP codes are welcome on the phone and they help us place you fast. Newbury Park, Pierpont, the Ventura Avenue corridor, Mira Monte, Santa Susana. 93001, 93003 and 93004 on the coast side. 93030, 93033, 93035 and 93036 in Oxnard. 93010 and 93012 in Camarillo. 93021 in Moorpark, 93041 in Port Hueneme, 93060 in Santa Paula, 93015 in Fillmore, 93023 in Ojai. If your ZIP is not on that list and your mail says Ventura County, the answer is still yes.
My mail says Camarillo but the county has my permit. Are you still the right call?
Yes, and the confusion is not something you got wrong.
A mailing address and a permit jurisdiction are two different facts about the same house. Plenty of properties here carry a city name on the envelope and sit on unincorporated county land, where Ventura County Building and Safety signs the inspections instead of a city counter. It matters the moment a wall has to be rebuilt rather than dried.
Even inside city limits, the counter is not always municipal. Plan check is the desk review your drawings sit in before a permit is issued, and Camarillo and Moorpark hand both that and the inspections to an outside firm, Charles Abbott Associates, while Fillmore uses Bureau Veritas. That is why an answer somebody gave you about a neighbor’s job three miles away can be flatly wrong for yours.
The Mountain Fire is the plainest example. It started the morning of November 6, 2024 in Balcom Canyon near Somis, ran to 19,904 acres and destroyed 243 structures, most of them houses on unincorporated ground with a Camarillo address. The county waived rebuild permit fees for owners who held those properties on the day of the fire, kept that waiver open through December 31, 2026, and dropped the zoning clearance step so fire rebuilds skip the planning queue entirely. Those owners are still building. Say so on the call if yours is one of them, because the paperwork path is not the ordinary one.
Tell us the year the house went up while you have somebody on the line, because in an older one a crew holds off until the sample comes back before it opens anything, and what gets sampled first covers why.
Can we do all of this in Spanish?
Both languages, from the first call to the walkthrough at the end.
Crews work in either one and so does our dispatcher, which matters more than it sounds when somebody is describing a smell they cannot name or explaining which room the ceiling came down in.
It matters on paper too. California requires that the cancellation notice attached to a home improvement contract be written in the same language used in the spoken sales conversation, and the statute names Spanish specifically. If the conversation happened in Spanish, the contract you sign and the notice stapled to it come in Spanish. Ordinarily that notice gives you three business days to change your mind. When the damage traces back to a fire or a storm that a city, the county, the Governor or the President declared an emergency, and here that covers most of the large ones, the window opens to seven business days.
The leak stopped days ago. Is it too late to call now?
Not too late, but the clock is real and it is short.
Dry a wet material within 24 to 48 hours and in most cases nothing grows. Past that window you are no longer drying a building, you are cleaning one, and the difference shows up in the invoice and in how much of the wall stays.
Call anyway, late. The expensive jobs here are almost never the ones where somebody dialed in a panic with the water still running. They are the ones where a slow leak behind a shower pan or under a slab worked quietly for a season, and the first symptom was a warm smell in a closet or a floorboard gone soft. Same story for a garage that took an inch of muddy water in a storm, got mopped, and was forgotten. If something smells wrong in your house and you cannot find it, that is reason enough to dial.
Should I call my insurance company before I call you?
Either order works, and neither call blocks the other.
Reporting a loss commits you to nothing, and starting emergency drying does not hurt a claim; leaving a building wet while you wait for a callback usually does. Most policies put a duty on the owner to prevent further damage, and drying equipment running the same night is the plainest evidence that you did.
Here is the division of labor. We do not decide your claim and we cannot promise an outcome. What we do is measure, photograph, log the moisture readings day by day, and itemize the work in the format carriers actually read. All of that goes into one case folder. That folder is the thing your carrier actually reads before it decides what this loss is worth. You submit it. The insurer’s own adjuster rules on it. Anyone who tells you otherwise on a first phone call is selling something.
Two things worth knowing before you dial the carrier. A standard homeowners policy does not cover flood, and a new flood policy generally takes 30 days to take effect, so it is not something you buy on the way home from the sandbags. And the flood map predicts less here than people assume: of the 1,331 flood claims ever paid in this county, 535, four in every ten, sat on property mapped outside the high-risk zone. Inside that zone there are 7,333 homes and 2,264 flood policies.
Who do I call for the parts that are not yours?
Almost nobody, and that is the whole point of holding both halves.
Extraction and drying, then board, texture, paint and floor, with no handoff in the middle. A few things do sit elsewhere. Here is who.
- The pipe, and the roof: a plumber, a roofer. Shutting the water off right now is ours. The permanent repair on whatever failed belongs to a different trade, and you hear that on the phone.
- Anything that carries weight: a structural engineer. Putting back the same joist, header or footing is ours. When the drawing has to change, an engineer draws and signs it and our crew executes that sheet exactly.
- The signature on the permit card: the counter that holds your address. We file, we schedule, we meet the inspector. No contractor moves a date on a public calendar, and which counter yours is depends on the property.
- A clearance result: an independent lab. Somebody with no stake in the outcome takes the sample and reads it. A number written by the crew being measured is worth nothing to a carrier.
- The wider shower you have wanted for years: still us, second contract. Damage repair puts back what the loss took. An upgrade gets its own price and its own signature line, never a ride inside a claim.
One note on paper, because it shapes every figure you are quoted. California will not let the building half be sold by the clock: a home improvement contract carries a total in dollars, agreed before the first tool comes off the rack. So the rebuild arrives as a closed number while the emergency hours are billed as hours.
Whatever is behind that wall, the first step takes two minutes: (805) 427-9039.
Where our crews go
Ten incorporated cities and the unincorporated ground between them. Oxnard is where the pin sits, and nobody in the county gets told they are outside the zone.
Most people who dial this number start by saying they are not sure it counts. Say it anyway: (805) 427-9039, and our dispatcher will tell you whether it does.