A five-dollar hose, and the laundry is now the wettest room you own.

Switching the machine off does nothing: the hoses upstream of it are still live. There are usually two taps on the wall behind the appliance, hot and cold. Close both. If they are seized, the main valve for the house is the fallback, and a seized laundry tap is worth replacing the same week.

Pull the plug as well, and do it before you start moving the machine. A washing machine that has been standing in water is not something to reach behind while it is energised.

A laundry floor is usually a sealed surface, so water runs to the edges and goes under. It travels along the subfloor into adjoining rooms, into the base of the partition walls and, in a house with a crawl space, straight through into it. What you can see is the smallest part of the problem.

This is the case where a moisture meter earns its keep. A crew reads the skirting boards and the wall base two rooms away, and the answer is regularly yes where the floor looked dry.

In an upstairs laundry the water goes down instead of out, and the ceiling below becomes the first thing to deal with.

A burst supply hose is the textbook sudden and accidental escape of water: it happened at a moment, it was not foreseeable from outside, and nobody left a tap running. Standard homeowners wording answers for the damage. The hose itself costs a few dollars and nobody argues about it.

The exception is the hose that had been visibly bulging or weeping for months. That turns the loss into a maintenance question, and photographs of the failed hose are how it gets settled either way. Take them before it goes in the bin.

Braided stainless hoses fail far less often than rubber ones and cost about the same. Replacing both while the machine is pulled out is the one piece of prevention worth doing on the day.