What Is the Impact of Fire Damage?

There are few disasters more traumatic than a major fire. It can occur at any time, and in just a few minutes, it can turn your entire life upside-down. As the fire burns, its damage can have a huge impact on your property.

Some aspects of fire damage are obvious, but others can be harder to detect and assess. To make sure you understand the full impact of the fire in your home, work with fire damage restoration professionals who know what to look for in assessing the effects of fire.

Heat Exposure

Many objects are resistant to burning, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t affected by the heat that fire produces. The heat of a fire can shatter ceramics and melt metals. Plastics will also melt at a much lower temperature than they typically burn. Fiberglass insulation won’t burn, but it can melt at temperatures common in house fires.

Other times, the damage from heat exposure might not be so easy to see. Steel, for example, won’t melt at typical house fire temperatures, but its properties can change. It can lose strength and hardness, becoming softer and more malleable. Sometimes heat that doesn’t cause wood to burn can change its properties. Exposure to heat for a prolonged period can weaken wood.

A fire damage restoration professional can look at the heat conditions and let you know if you might have to worry about damage to things behind the wall that you might not be able to see.

Smoke Exposure

Smoke that comes off a fire can spread throughout a building, and it can cause significant damage of its own. The type of smoke damage depends on the nature of the smoke.

Some smoke is highly acidic, and it will attack electronics and other metals on contact. If you’re not aware of this type of damage, you might turn on electronics that you think were unaffected by the fire only to find that they are badly damaged inside. This might mean it simply won’t turn on, or it might mean a short circuit that could ironically start another fire.

Residual smoke smell can persist for months, even years after a fire. Some smoke contains organic chemicals that may outgas for a long time after the fire, filling the air with toxic chemicals. Other smoke might penetrate walls, fabrics, and cushions, creating a persistent smell, but without toxic properties.

A fire damage restoration professional can look at the type of fire and the smoke created to help you understand what smoke damage you have after the fire, and what steps are recommended to deal with its effects.

Water Damage

When you have a major fire, you need the intervention of the fire department to extinguish it. Most of the time, the fire department will extinguish the fire using copious amounts of water. While this is a very effective way to extinguish a fire, it can also cause problems of its own.

Of course, there are many items in your home that will be immediately ruined by contact with water. However, it’s also possible to save more objects after water damage than you think, especially if you act quickly to remediate the water damage.

First, it’s important to remove standing water immediately, if possible, then start controlled drying of everything exposed to water. You want to use controlled air flow to dry everything fast enough to avoid mold growth and other damage, but there are many items you don’t want to dry too fast, as this can cause other damage such as warped wood. You might think that heat is a good choice to speed drying, but it can speed mold growth more than it aids drying.

A water damage restoration professional can evaluate water-damaged items to determine the best approach for preserving them. This includes identifying when an object would benefit from drying under controlled conditions or other specialized restoration techniques. They can also help you identify which items are worth saving, and which ones would cost more to restore than replace.

Let Dayspring Restoration Help You Recover from a Fire

It is possible to recover from a serious fire at your home or business. Working with an experienced restoration professional can speed up recovery.

Dayspring Restoration has been the leading fire damage restoration provider throughout Montana since 1989. We have maintained our position by providing outstanding restoration services to all the communities in the area. When you call Dayspring, we can be out quickly at any time, day or night, with our 24/7 emergency response services. We’ll begin work quickly, inspecting the property to make sure it’s safe, then prioritizing restoration steps to preserve as much of your property as possible.

Dayspring can handle every aspect of the restoration process, from initial inspection and board-up service to the final touches that can make it almost impossible for anyone to tell that there was ever a fire. That’s thanks to our meticulous approach and our use of the restoration industry’s leading-edge technologies.

Perhaps best of all, Dayspring can coordinate directly with your insurance company. After the trauma of a fire, the last thing you need is to deal with your insurer’s complicated process. We work with insurance all the time, and we know how to manage their system. When we arrive on site, we will start documenting the damage, and we’ll document all the repairs to satisfy the requirements of your insurer. We can help you get compensation to the full limit of your coverage – you won’t have your claim delayed or denied because it was poorly documented.

You have many things to deal with after a fire. Let Dayspring handle the fire damage. Please contact us now to get a restoration professional out immediately.