Fire and Smoke Damage Cleanup

The damage from a fire keeps working after the fire stops. Smoke residue is acidic and it goes on etching the surfaces it settled on, which is why a brass fixture that looked fine on Tuesday is pitted by Friday, and why a countertop that could have been cleaned in week one is permanently marked in week three. The window where most fire losses are still fully cleanable is measured in days.

The first forty eight hours after the fire department leaves decide how much of your house is recoverable, and almost nothing that happens in them is intuitive. The building is wet, because putting out a fire uses a great deal of water, which means you have a water loss and a fire loss at the same time and the drying clock started while the hoses were still running. The power may be off, so the refrigerator is a second problem forming quietly. Windows and openings need covering to keep weather and people out, and that is a trade we identify for you on the first visit rather than one we perform.

Not all soot is the same and the method has to match it. Dry smoke from a fast, hot, well-fed fire leaves a powdery residue that lifts with dry sponges and vacuuming, and putting a wet cleaner on it first turns it into a smear that will not come out. Wet smoke from a slow, smoldering, oxygen-starved fire leaves a sticky, staining film that needs solvent-based cleaning. Protein residue from a kitchen fire is nearly invisible, coats everything, and carries an odor that survives three passes of the wrong product. Guessing wrong on the first pass turns cleanable into permanent.

So we test before we clean. A technician runs cleaning trials on an inconspicuous area of each material type in the affected space, to establish which method that surface takes. It costs twenty minutes and it decides the outcome of the whole job.

Contents come before structure, for a practical reason. Everything you own is in the way of cleaning the room, everything you own is absorbing odor while it sits there, and the items with the shortest window before damage becomes permanent are usually the personal ones. We inventory and photograph the room, pack the contents that need off-site cleaning, protect what stays, and only then work the structure. Our contents page covers how the pack-out and the pack-back run.

Air handling runs throughout. Fire residue becomes airborne the moment cleaning starts, so we set containment and run air scrubbers under HEPA filtration to keep the affected area from cross-contaminating the rest of the building. In a house where two rooms burned, the other rooms are usually recoverable, and they stay recoverable only if the work is contained.

The air conditioning system deserves its own paragraph, because it is the most reliable way to turn a two room fire into a whole house problem. If the system ran at any point during or after the fire, residue is in the ductwork, and every cycle after that redistributes it into rooms that were never involved. Turn it off and leave it off. We assess the ducts as part of the scope, and where the system needs professional cleaning we say so, because a spotless living room served by a contaminated duct run smells like a fire again six weeks later.

Odor is its own stage and it comes last. Cleaning takes out most of it and the remainder is not a fragrance problem. Odor molecules sit embedded in porous materials and they have to be taken out at the source rather than covered over. That is a different set of equipment and a different certification, and our odor removal page explains what it involves.

Buildings older than 1978 change the sequence. Before materials get disturbed in a pre-1978 property we test for asbestos and lead, because fire damaged building materials in Los Angeles housing stock frequently contain both. If regulated material is present we stop, contain the area, and coordinate a specialist abatement firm that holds the required state certifications for that portion. Major League Response does not perform asbestos or lead abatement.

Insurance losses run on documentation. We photograph the loss as found, log the affected areas and materials, prepare an estimate for our own scope of work, and can bill the carrier directly for our services. We will meet your adjuster on site and walk the scope where that helps. What we do not do is act as your adjuster, and our insurance page states exactly where that boundary sits.

Work that puts the building back together after the cleanup is a separate trade and we identify it on the first visit. The cleaning and the odor work belong to us. The structure work belongs to someone who holds a state license for it, and knowing that on day one is worth considerably more than finding it out on day twenty.

Our technicians hold the IICRC fire and smoke restoration certification along with odor control, and we dispatch around the clock from Sylmar across the San Fernando Valley. Sylmar has its own fire history, from the 2008 Sayre Fire that destroyed more than six hundred structures to the Saddleridge Fire, and the wildfire side of this work has its own page because ash and soot from a wildfire behave differently from residue from a structure fire.