Navigating Water Damage Restoration: Essential Steps to Salvage Your Home
November 25, 2022Navigating Water Damage Restoration: Essential Steps to Salvage Your Home
November 25, 2022From Damage to Renewal: The Art of Repairs and Rebuilds After Disasters
Fire damage caused by natural disasters and home emergencies are often thought of as unusual, rare events that occur in remote places and hardly affect your daily life, but actually, emergencies happen more often than you would expect. Whether caused by natural events such as hurricanes or floods, which are common in coastal areas like Saint Lucie County; or by man-made accidents, an emergency can present at any given moment and affect your property and belongings in several ways. According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in 2022, a single house fire was reported every 88 seconds nationwide.
Dealing with these damages can be a stressful experience for anyone since a common person is likely unaware of how to act during and after a fire. The building reparations, cleaning, and dealing with insurance may result in hassle for an already stressed person. That’s why you’ll find a comprehensive guide on fire damages and the aftermath remediations in this article.
Understanding Fire Damage
House and other building fires are especially destructive since they can cause multiple damage types to several building parts, ranging from furniture to the building structure itself, making it difficult for a typical person to identify what fire damage is and its actual magnitude. The heat, flames, smoke, and soot may cause different damages in different parts, and, on top of that, the water and chemicals used to extinguish the fire can also damage structures, furniture, home appliances, and some food.
To help you identify the three most common damages caused by fires, they’ve been classified as heat damage, soot or smoke, and water damage. However, insurance companies may classify the damages in different ways, and most use a class system (Class A, B, C, D, or E).
Heat Damage:
The heat created by the flames may cause damage to floors, ceilings, walls, beams, and other belongings inside the house since the high temperature can melt, combust, or burn objects. Usually, this type of damage results in structural concerns, and walls, ceilings and more need to be replaced, but that depends on the fire’s intensity and the object’s distance to the fire’s source.
This damage type can also include:
- Charring damage, which refers to objects partially burned with blackened surfaces and when they’re considered to maintain a safe structure, can be salvaged.
- Cracked and warped walls or ceilings, especially on wooden structures, can result in structural compromise due to the broken, warped, or splinted fibers. Professionals need to revise to avoid more profound damages and accidents in the long run.
Smoke and soot damage:
This refers to all damages caused to an object or surface by the smoke or the soot created by the fire. The smoke and soot particles remaining in the building may affect your breathing health and cause foul odors, discolorations, and corrosion on your belongings.
The severity of this damage is determined by several factors such as the object’s proximity to the fire’s source, how long the fire burned, the burned material, and the material affected. For example, burning plastic may leave a sticky substance, while wood or paper leaves dry, ashy powders.
Typically, when the smoke smell stays long after a fire and the initial cleaning, is because the smoke penetrated deeper than the burned surface layer and may need abrasing cleaning to remove these deeper layers and the smell.
Water Damage:
When the fire is extinguished, the water used may damage or stain your house's floors, drywalls, stones, brick, and wood structures. Some of these materials, such as the wood or the drywall, may need to be replaced due to mold and humidity concerns compromising their safety. Some others, like stones, may be stained, which can be removed with clean abrasion.
House fires and their causes: How to act when facing them?
House fires can occur due to many causes, but according to the NFPA, the most common causes are man-made accidents and electrical issues within buildings. The three most common causes reported until 2022 by the agency are:
How to face them?
Facing a residential fire puts huge emotional distress on the victims, who can get altered by the emergency. Knowing this is a highly stressful situation for any person, several organizations, such as the Red Cross, have made easily accessible guides on acting in case of a fire. These often include getting out of the property, staying out, and contacting your local emergency services or 911. In Saint Lucie County, you may call the county’s management center or any of the fire districts. If the way out is blocked, stay in the room with closed doors, call your emergency services, and try to wave a flashlight through the windows to ask for outside help.
Once the local emergency services have handled the situation, another crucial part is to assess the damage caused to your property. This can include contacting your insurance company and beginning the restoration process, which should be done by a professional team trained to identify and look for all the possible damages to the building.
This can be a long and exhausting process for the affected persons, and that’s why there are restoration companies in the market specializing in fire damage restoration and cleaning, such as Aquaseekers.
How to proceed after a fire: Damage Restoration
Cleaning and restoring a property after a fire is a job that needs to be done by professionals, as the impact of the damages varies from thing to thing, and some materials and places may result in severe compromise. The building’s internal structure can be affected after the fire, putting you and your family in danger. That’s why an experienced technician should assess the damage’s magnitude.
What is the fire damage restoration process?
Water damage mitigation
Professionals will make sure to identify and mitigate all possible damages caused by the water used in the fire extinction process, which can leave wet parts on the building and lead to mold and corrosion issues in the long run. So the structure should be dry out, removing as much water as possible from its structure.
Cleaning up
The process continues with the damage clean-up, which should be done as soon as possible to protect your belongings. The cleaning process has several steps to guarantee the burned areas have been properly cleaned and deodorized, preventing future health problems due to breathing soot and housing issues like corrosion and decoloration.
There are multiple actions to take when cleaning up the damages, such as: checking the air filters, removing debris and damaged material that can’t be repaired, removing any affected drywalls or floors down to the stud, and more. Due to this, is not rare if you decide to consult with a restoration company to take care of the cleaning and restoration process.
At Aquaseekers, we don’t only handle the damage cleaning, ensuring that all soot, smoke, and unsalvaged objects are removed, but we also develop a comprehensive restoration plan for your property, putting it back to its pre-fire conditions.
Restoring the damages
This is the major step in the restoration process, and it refers to replacing, rebuilding, and restoring your property to its original condition. It can include several repairing and construction tasks that should be left in the hands of professionals, such as:
- Establish a custody chain for your damaged belongings to guarantee they are returned.
- Repairing damaged furniture and home appliances.
- Replacing affected drywalls and floorings.
- Replacing the roof or ceilings.
- Restoring all the damaged electrical systems.
The Art of Repair and Rebuilding: Why you should work with professionals
The fire damage restoration process has many steps, including reparations, construction, and electrical tasks. Most people don’t have such specialized knowledge about repairing buildings, which can make your property restoration overwhelming.
When you leave the damage restoration process in the hands of an expert, you are not only ensuring the job is correctly done and your property is safe again, but also you’re relieving yourself from another stressful situation, allowing you to be accompanied and guided after the fire. When the repair and rebuild are done by professionals, you are:
Preventing further damage
Restoration companies are available 24/7 because they know that taking immediate action after the fire helps to prevent further damage to your house or property. It minimizes the structural, smoke, and water damage that may cause safety issues in the future.
Ensuring safety:
Fire damage restoration technicians are trained in safety standards. This leads them to guarantee not only their safety while remediating and repairing the damages but also to ensure your safety, disregarding exposure to unhealthy situations such as soot, asbestos, and smoke residues.
Start a new with AquaSeek fire remediation services
At Aquaseekers, our main goal is to assist our clients in every way possible when restoring their properties. We strive to make your property restoration process as stress-free as possible for you, as we understand you’re already experiencing emotional distress from the fire. When assisting you, we not only take care of the remediation, cleaning, and restoration process, but we also work closely with your insurance company to ensure you receive the compensation you deserve.
Please, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have experienced any fire damage on your property. We are available for emergencies 24 hours a day, and we’ll support you in all the steps necessary to recover you from this difficult time.