Removing Odors After A Fire

8/3/2020 (Permalink)

Whether it is big or small, a fire burning inside your Oak Lawn home is never a pleasant situation. Flames and heat burn contents and building materials. Smoke possibly flows throughout the building leaving behind soot residues and foul odors.

After a burn, one of the last and most important steps is to remove all pungent odors that get left behind. Oak Lawn's fire damage technicians at SERVPRO follow four steps when deodorizing a structure. First, we remove the source, then we clean, recreate, and seal.
 
Deodorization after a blaze sometimes gets complicated since foul odors usually have more than one type of source. In some situations, multiple methods must be used to remove odors, but the four steps still get followed. To start with, our team always removes the source of the odor. Any debris that got severely burnt and is smelling pungent gets discarded from the area.
 
Awful smells inside a home often come from soot residues that adhere to surfaces after a fire. If smoke smells still exist after removing all burnt items, then most likely the source is the odor-causing residues sticking to surfaces in different rooms of the condo. Our restoration crews follow the smoke and make sure to clean all areas that soot is present.
 
If horrible smells still exist after cleaning, then odor particles penetrated deep into contents and building materials inside the structure. The best way to remedy this problem is to recreate the same conditions odor particles stuck to the materials by using a chemical fogger. Sometimes this step gets skipped if it is not needed.
 

In many scenarios, odors get eliminated by just removing the source and cleaning soot residues. If the first two steps do not work, fogging is the next option then the last step is to seal. Our experts often seal surfaces that get exposed to malodors. In some cases, we paint over walls or wooden studs with specialized sealant paint.

After deodorization, we do a final cleaning process that sometimes involves adding pleasant odors to the air.  For professional help with the restoration process, call SERVPRO of Oak Lawn (708) 239-1444.