Fire Damage Affecting Residents In Lexington

1/18/2017 (Permalink)

Smoke Detectors in Your Lexington Home Save Property and Maybe Lives

Smoke & Fire Require Rapid Treatment to Mitigate Damages to a Home or Business

You get a call late Tuesday evening notifying you of a fire in one of your buildings. According to authorities, one of the basement apartments caught fire and received severe smoke, fire, and water damage, affecting several neighboring apartments. No one was injured, but a few tenants will need help relocating until repairs are complete.
 
Sometimes, people live in close enough proximity to where an accident can have far-reaching consequences. What seems to be a small amount of fire damage occurring to a single Lexington home, turns into an event that encompasses several homes within the same building. Everyone involved in an incident like this will need access to a company that can handle many clients at once, with the proper amount of personnel and equipment available to perform all of the services each of the sites require.
 
At SERVPRO, a complete fire damage restoration involves understanding how smoke behaves. Our technicians need to know more about smoke to properly remove the different types of residues displaced during a fire; soot and smoke particles tend to settle onto or adhere to various surfaces, each causing different kinds of stains and damage.
 
The temperature of both the smoke itself and the surrounding surfaces play a role in how smoke behaves. As a fire continues to burn, it consistently pulls cooler air upwards, heating it. The rising air forces the air near the ceiling downwards, creating convection currents. These currents cause the hotter soot particles and smoke to rise, remaining closer to the top of the room as they migrate to adjacent areas of your home. Smoke continues moving higher until it has nowhere else to go.
 
However, the current doesn't just stop; it will continue swirling around the upper portion of the room as the fire progresses, which is why heat lines develop during a fire. SERVPRO technicians find that areas above these heat lines contain harder to remove residues than other sections of the home because the temperature in these locations have the ability to open pores wider on the surface of a wall, allowing aerosols and residues to penetrate deeper into the material.
 
Understanding the behavior of smoke is only a tiny fraction of what we address when helping restore your property. Ozone machines and hydroxyl generators can capture smoky particulates from the ambient air, but that is only one element of the factors that we grapple with to restore your home to its preloss condition. The goal of every member of SERVPRO staff is to safely return your home to a quality pre-damage condition while providing you with the support you need to overcome a particularly trying situation.
 
Place a call to our expertly trained staff at SERVPRO of Lexington / Thomasville today, (336) 224-2565