If Your Water is DIRTY, you MUST remove all water damage affected materials, including the carpet (do NOT complete this article, you must remove the carpet). If you are affected by grey water damage or clean water damage you can clean and save the carpet. This article explains how to save and restore the water damaged carpet.

Prep the Carpet:

Using an awl, pick up a corner of the water damaged carpet, being very careful of the tack strip (if you have one).

If You Do NOT Have a Tack Strip:
Your carpet is mostly likely glued down. This signals the absence of padding.

If You DO Have a Tack Strip:
If you do have padding and your carpet is on a tack strip, continue to pull it off the tacks. Work cautiously and carefully, as to not fray and ruin the carpet. If you have a looped or Berber carpet, you must be even more careful, as these styles of carpet tend to become unraveled easily.

Padding:

No matter what type of water damage you were affected by, you MUST get rid of the padding. The flooded padding will not dry out fast enough to mitigate mold, so you absolutely must trash the padding. 

Treatment & Cleaning of the Carpet:

Using either a pump up sprayer or a handheld trigger sprayer, thoroughly spray the backside of the carpeting. Once again, I highly recommend using a pump up sprayer with a solution tank, or at least two coats of both your deodorizer and disinfectant if you are using a hand held trigger sprayer or aerosol.

For the visible surface of the carpet, you must clean it with deodorizer and a disinfectant. A carpet cleaning machine from your local hardware store should do the trick. Move furniture and personal items around so that you successfully clean every square inch of the carpet. Since you have already extracted your carpet with a wet/dry vacuum and cleaned it, the carpet should no longer be dripping wet. If it is, you must extract and/or clean it further.