What Causes Smoke Odors in My Bloomfield Home After a Fire?

7/26/2020 (Permalink)

Fires can leave lingering smells and odors in your home. Contact SERVPRO for smoke odor removal in your home.

Our professionals work around the clock to address lingering fire loss effects like odors after a disaster.

Fires are a traumatic situation for your Bloomfield home and can leave you facing multiple obstacles simultaneously to return your property to its original condition. As challenging as these circumstances might be, it is rarely something homeowners can address on their own. The inclusion of qualified restoration technicians like ours can help the process to become more efficient.

The smells of these disasters can often be one of the most significant hurdles specifically because fire smoke odor removal in Bloomfield homes does not happen until the final stages of restoration in most cases. The solution is to lessen the impact of these conditions through deliberate cleaning and recovery tactics and utilize cutting-edge equipment and products at the appropriate times to neutralize odors. Once you have notified our SERVPRO team of a fire loss or active extinguishment taking place, we can arrive to begin the first step: emergency services and recovery.

Do Emergency Services Lessen Smoke Odors?

Emergency services work to help the property in many ways after a loss incident. Our in-house contractors and skilled restoration technicians work together on multiple strategies to reduce the presence and severity of odors and other fire loss conditions in Bloomfield homes. Several approaches can address the present smoke and burning smells throughout the damaged areas of your home even before official deodorization gets underway, and some of these are:

• Debris Removal – Piles of ash and debris throughout the property can be hotspots for foul odors after a loss. The sooner these burned remnants of contents and structural elements can be removed, the less severe the odor situation can become. 
• Surface Cleaning - Smoke residues occur from several types of fires with different materials burned. Wet smoke is a challenging coating to remove, and can also produce strong odors for our technicians to face. 
• Content Management - How fire effects like odors impact the personal belongings throughout the house, including sensitive materials like clothing, furniture, and other fabrics, can lead to a need for content cleaning and deodorization to protect these items. 

What Are the Best Deodorization Tools?

Deodorization approaches vary substantially from one fire-damaged property to the next, as there are multiple suitable solutions to remove lingering scents. The choice between the powerful tools in our inventory often falls to the placement of damage, the severity and spread of these effects, and whether the occupants of the house have gotten removed temporarily. The three primary types of deodorizing tools used in these situations include:

• Hydroxyl Generators
• Ozone Machines
• Thermal/ULV Foggers

Choosing among these machines involves a careful assessment of the damaged area and the severity of the present odors. Occupants or pets in the house during restoration can impact the deodorizing techniques used, as highly efficient odor removal tactics like ozone cannot get used in an occupied dwelling.

What Happens to Odor-Damaged Contents?

Content management is often one of the first actions taken to protect your property and its belongings after a fire. Some of the more damaged items encountered by our technicians get relocated to our SERVPRO facility for focused cleaning and deodorization. Off-site recovery can allow our team to safely store our customers' belongings until in-house restoration and cleaning complete. Actions taken in our facility to clean and deodorize materials pulled from an extinguished structure fire include:

• Ozone Chamber Deodorization - This larger work area presents a safe space for harmful ozone to dissipate before we go in and collect the lot of items recovered simultaneously. We can often deodorize entire rooms' worth of contents at once.
• Ultrasonic Tank Soot Cleaning - Immersion tanks are ideal for hard objects covered with soot and smoke residues. Bubbles generated by vibrations burst on the surface of impacted materials to break up challenging coatings. 
• Thorough Water-Damage Drying - Extinguishment tactics often leave many of the items recovered from the house damp or heavily water damaged. We have effective drying techniques to help. 

When Does Odor Removal Happen?

Odor removal is often one of the final steps of recovery and restoration. Many of the tactics for mitigation and emergency services can lessen the severity of present odors. However, the last official neutralization occurs along with the cleaning stages that often accompany reconstruction.

Fire odors can be a challenging obstacle for even our experienced SERVPRO of Nutley / Bloomfield team to face. We have a fast response with experienced professionals and cutting-edge equipment to make a difference quickly. However we can help, you can call us anytime at (973) 662-0062.