One must never try to fix fire damage on their own.
Even the thought of your home on fire is horrifying. It is dangerous, destructive, and traumatizing – but the most you can do is keep yourself and your family safe and act bravely.
After a fire, water (used to extinguish), clouds of smoke, soot, debris, and ashes are found all over the property. You need to hire a professional to clean this up. Once the fire is extinguished, the process of restoration and remediation begins.
Here are some steps of the fire remediation process that you must be aware of.
Step 1: Ensuring That the Property is Safe to Enter
The first step the fire remediation service professionals take is ensuring and confirming that the property is safe to enter. For this, they will contact the fire department or conduct a quick inspection on their own before they confirm the property as safe.
Step 2: Minimizing Damage by Smoke
Even when the fire is extinguished, the property is still exposed to smoke and soot. If the smoke and soot are not removed immediately, the chances of soot stains, corrosion, rust, and mold growth increase. This is why the second step of the remediation process is to quickly sort out the sensitive materials such as wood furniture, cabinets, metal decorative, carpets, textiles, and others. The professionals clean these materials quickly to minimize the damage.
They also look for signs of mold, mildew, and water damage in pipes or appliances to prevent further damages. Once all such materials are sorted out, the professionals start with the restoration.
Step 3: Removing Debris and Soot
One of the initial steps entails cleaning up the debris and soot from the entire property. The soot not only causes more damage as long as it remains, but it also gets in the way of the restoration. It also affects the air quality around the place and causes airborne odors. Hence, it needs to be cleared up as soon as possible before it spreads to new places.
Step 4: Removing Items That Are Too Damaged to Restore
The next step a professional fire remediation service takes is removing all items that are too damaged to restore. This is part of the clean up, where they now start clearing up all items that can’t be recovered. This includes clothing items, boxes, decoration pieces, small tables, or any other things that are too burnt too restore. The electrical appliances and machines are checked with extra caution.
Step 5: Removing Excess Water
The fire department often leaves a huge amount of water that is used to extinguish the fire at the site, which later becomes a problem for the restoration professionals. In the next step, the professionals eliminate all excess standing and soaked water. For this, they use commercial dehumidifiers to ensure that the property is dried out completely.
Step 6: Restoring and Sanitizing
The last step is to start restoring the property back to its original form and sanitizing it. The restoration process includes using deep cleaning methods and products to bring back items to their original form.
