How to Handle Contents Restoration After a Fire

As a commercial property owner, property manager, business owner, or facility manager you hope that you never have to deal with the fallout of a fire. But when the unthinkable happens, dealing with fire damage can be overwhelming for you, your business, and your tenants in Billings Heights, Laurel, Red Lodge, and beyond.

It can be somewhat challenging to deal with damage to your building, but it can be even more complicated to understand the best way to deal with damage to the contents of your property or business. How can you repair or restore these items?

Smoke damage, soot, water, and chemicals from extinguishing a fire don’t go away on their own. The smells that linger after the fire is out don’t just impact your building; they also impact the contents. What is the best course of action to handle this kind of damage?

CONTENTS RESTORATION SERVICES: HOW TO GET PROFESSIONAL HELP

Generally, fire can create two different kinds of smoke damage

• Visible soot
• Invisible odors

Each fire is different, which means that there isn’t one way to go about removing both soot and odor from the contents of your commercial property. For example, the smoke odor from wood may react differently to cleaning agents than the smoke odor caused by plastics. In some cases, dry cleaning can remove odors and discoloration from soot and smoke, but not always.

Damage to soft, absorbent surfaces, business equipment, and building inventory will need to be assessed by professionals on a case-by-case basis to determine the best way to deal with the damage.

Carpet, upholstered furniture, clothing, and other textiles can typically be restored after a fire—that is, if they have not been scorched or severely damaged by water. However, this process must be a careful one. Soot is oily and can easily stain items forever if not removed properly. The fire has very likely released chemicals into the air that need to be removed to ensure your building is safe to occupy again.

It’s tempting to want to deal with this mess yourself, especially if you have an on-site maintenance team, housekeeping crew, or professional cleaning staff. After all, the financial loss of a fire can be devastating, even with the best insurance. However, professional restoration teams are well-versed in the correct cleaning procedures to salvage equipment, documents, soft-sided furniture, and other items or contents within the building. Working on your own, you may not be able to reclaim these indispensable items. These are not normal maintenance tasks and you don’t want to put your team—or your investment—at risk.

An experienced restoration and cleaning contractor has the tools, equipment, and knowledge needed to do the job right, keeping your team and customers, residents, and/or employees safe.

The Contents Restoration Process in Billings Heights

When your business or building goes through a major disaster like a fire, your assets can wind up severely damaged. Fortunately, with meticulous care, these items can often be restored to as close to “new” as possible. Here’s the process our team of trained professionals takes to restore the contents of your building:

Assessing, Inventory, and Packing

After the last embers of the fire cool, we’ll go through the buildings contents and gather all salvageable items. Then we’ll photograph and inventory all restorable contents so they can be tracked and quickly accessed. These items will be professionally packed and transported to our facility for cleaning using our proven cleaning tools and methods.

Cleaning

Our experts evaluate each item one by one, choosing the best method to clean them, based on several factors:

• Are they hard or soft?
• Do they require hand washing?
• What kinds of cleaning chemicals can be used?

Many hard items will be clean automatically using machines equipped with ultrasonic cleaning technology and deodorizers to address smoke odors. Those that need to be washed by hand will be carefully cleaned using de-greasers and odor counteractants. Soft contents are cleaned with caution, using powerful-yet-gentle dry cleaning after all traces of soot and smoke have been removed.

Once all items have been cleaned, they go through an additional deodorization process to counteract and eliminate trace residual odors and are carefully dried.

Throughout this process, all the contents of your building are tracked from start to finish. We’ll keep confidential or personal items separate from one another. Then, everything is wrapped and delicately packed in a clean, fresh box and re-inventoried to keep all like items together. It is then stored in a climate-controlled facility.

Move-In

When your commercial space, building, or facility has been properly restored, we’ll gingerly load up your items and transport them back to your space so you can begin to resume normal business operations once more.

South Central Montana’s Disaster Restoration Specialists

At Alpha Omega Disaster Restoration, we take special care to protect your interests as a property owner, business owner, or facilities manager. As business owners ourselves, we understand your vested interest in bringing your commercial space back to life after a fire. We’ll take great care to protect and restore the contents of your space.

Throughout south-central Montana including Billinngs, Billings West End, Billings Heights, Laurel, Red Lodge we’ll be there for you. To learn more about our professional contents restoration services, contact our team today.