As a home or business owner, you are likely already aware of fire safety and fire prevention measures that you should take to protect your home or building. However, many people aren’t familiar with what happens in the fire restoration process should an emergency occur.
If your preventive measures fail and your home or building is damaged in a fire, you’ll want a fire restoration plan you can count on. Here is everything you need to know about fire restoration and what you can expect:
Table of Contents
Understanding Fire Restoration
Fire restoration is combined into multiple processes to recover from the devastation efficiently. Restoration tasks include assessing property damage, ensuring the property is safe and secure, and cleaning and restoring it as close as possible to its original state.
Other Disaster Relief Restoration Processes
Fire restoration is similar to other disaster restoration relief efforts and has overlapping elements. A good example might be that fire restoration could involve handling water damage caused by putting out the fire.
Both water and fire can cause substantial damage to your property and belongings. Typically, fire disaster cleanups take significantly longer than other restorations. The extra time could come from addressing a more comprehensive array of issues—such as smoke damage—during a fire restoration.
How Professional Fire Restoration Services Can Help
If you’ve experienced a house or building fire, contacting a team of professionals with experience restoring buildings after fires should be your first step. Partnering with professionals can significantly speed up the restoration, keep your home or building safe, and lower the risks of additional property damage.
These technicians are also excellent at dealing with unexpected problems and complex tasks, like deodorizing a building from the smoke. A qualified fire restoration company can give you peace of mind in a troubling time.
The Fire Restoration Process: Assessing Damage
When you hire professional fire restoration services, you can expect the process to follow a few general steps. The first usually involves assessing damage.
Having seen many similar sights in their line of work, fire restoration professionals will know which areas of the property may have what kind of damage done to them. They often use inspection checklists to track what needs to be addressed. This part of the process is also when you collectively decide what should stay and what should go, depending on how damaged it was by the fire.
This step is crucial to understanding how much the restoration will cost and how long it could take. An assessment enables the restoration experts to calculate a more accurate price estimate while devising a plan to restore the property to a healthy, livable condition as soon as possible.
Securing the Property
Fire-damaged homes often aren’t very secure; fences, doors, and windows can all be damaged enough to leave your property vulnerable to intruders. Professionals will check the property for these locations and ensure they are secure during restoration. Doing so will protect everything inside your home or building from weather damage.
Cleaning Up
The cleaning phase is usually the longest and most labor-intensive part of a restoration. The team will use personal protective equipment and scour your home for soot and smoke stains, removing and deodorizing them. Any water damage will also require disinfecting, so your team will usually include antimicrobial chemicals to discourage bacterial growth when they clean.
Reconstruction vs. Cleanup
With the property finally clean, the focus shifts to reconstruction. Some types of damage, such as a collapsed roof or structural damage, may require more than cleaning, which could compromise the safety of the building.
This step may be long or short, depending on how many structures incurred damage during the fire. It could involve everything from rebuilding your roof to restoring a few walls.
Reconstruction can also include demolition if areas of the home or building aren’t worth salvaging. The team will always try to reuse what they can, but some areas may be damaged enough to warrant rebuilding.
Fire Restoration Can Make Your Home or Building Look Like New Again
No matter how prepared you are for a fire, the damage from a house or building fire can be extensive and significant. However, fire restoration can successfully restore your property to optimal condition. By partnering with professionals and knowing what to expect in the process, dealing with the aftermath of a fire can be much less daunting.