James Cummings is the general manager of Servpro of Ahwatukee & South Tempe in Arizona, a branch of Servpro, the national fire and water cleanup and restoration company. Here, he explains how his company responds to emergencies and what types of cleanup and restoration services it provides for homeowners whose homes have suffered flooding and/or water damage.
Many steps are involved when dealing with emergency water damage. The first step is to ensure the safety of all the occupants of the home or building. At Servpro, we always inform residents of any potential hazards that we can see.
The second step is to determine what type of water damage your home is facing. Water quality is broken down into three categories:
- Category 1: Clean water. This is the most common type of water damage. It originates from a sanitary water source and does not pose substantial risk from dermal, ingestion, or inhalation exposure. It typically comes from a pipe break in the home, such as from a toilet supply line, washing machine hose, or refrigerator ice maker line. Although this type of loss begins as a Category 1, it can quickly change to a Category 2 or 3 once it contacts building materials, contents, and other soils and contaminants that may be present in the loss area.
- Category 2: Grey water. Grey water contains significant contamination and has the potential to cause discomfort or sickness if contacted or consumed by humans. Examples can include, but are not limited to, water from dishwashers, overflow from washing machines, overflow from toilets, and broken aquariums.
- Category 3: Black Water. Black water is grossly contaminated and can contain pathogenic, toxigenic, or other harmful agents. Example of black water can include but are not limited to sewage, toilet backups which originate from beyond the trap (the back portion of the toilet that holds water and the flusher) regardless of visible content or color, all forms of flooding from seawater, ground surface water, and rising water from rivers and streams.
Once the category of water is determined, the technician will explain the scope of work that will be needed to successfully dry your home. In typical Category 1 water damage, we first remove all the loose water from the floor using powerful truck-mounted extraction equipment or portable extractors. We can extract the water from the carpet without pulling it back. This saves the integrity of the carpet since carpet backing loses at least 50% of its strength when wet.
The next step is to block the furniture that is sitting on the carpet to prevent furniture stains from transferring to the carpet. Furniture stains are permanent in many cases.
Then we calculate the amount of drying equipment that is needed for the size of the building and materials affected. “High-volume air movers” are placed around the rooms with “low-grain refrigerant dehumidifiers” to remove the moisture that is being evaporated from the building materials. We then check the materials with moisture meters to ensure that we dry all of the building materials: carpet, cabinets, drywall, insulation, studs, sill plates and rafters, back to the “dry standard,” which is the moisture content in unaffected similar materials within the same building.
