What Happens to My Belongings in a Pack-Out Process?

7/16/2020 (Permalink)

SERVPRO knows that your contents are just as important as the rest of your Waterbury home. We will handle all of your property with care.

Fire damage to Waterbury homes is sometimes severe and requires off-site recovery of impacted contents and belongings through a pack-out process. 

Fire restoration for many Waterbury homes involves practical solutions to protect belongings and contents within the property. While deodorization, debris removal, and other mitigation objectives can be a pressing need once extinguishing is complete, it is the possessions in your house that can make it feel like home. We strive to limit your expenses by offering consistent and reliable content management when we first arrive.

Fire damage in Waterbury homes can often spread rapidly from the most damaged area, the ignition point, to the rest of the property. Using channels like the HVAC system, smoke, ash, and debris can impact contents and structural surfaces throughout the house. While there are options that can sometimes exist to relocate your belongings to a safe place within the worksite to prevent exposure, this is not always practical, and there are many circumstances where the damage has already begun.

What is Content Management? 

In more understandable terms, content management is the series of actions taken when technicians first arrive to reduce the devastation that migrating effects can present. An evaluation conducted on an item-by-item basis determines what individual items require and the best approach to return them to their original state. There are some situations where relocation on-site or basic cleaning techniques can be enough to protect and preserve furniture, textiles, and personal belongings, but not always. After a structure fire, some conditions can impact these individual items directly, leaving several obstacles for our responding technicians. Some of these include:

• Soot
• Smoke Damage
• Odors
• Ash

When Is Pack-Out Necessary? 

In the instances where damage to your belongings has become too severe for on-site recovery, some options exist to restore them in our SERVPRO facility. Utilizing some of the most sophisticated recovery tools in the industry, we have a team of cleaning technicians who are available to restore your most treasured items and keepsakes to their original conditions. Pack-out is often a last resort situation, as leaving your possessions in the care of our professionals can be a stressful option for many property owners.

There are specific conditions where pack-out might be impossible to avoid, however. To preserve and protect some of your belongings after a structure fire, it requires immediate attention with some of the sophisticated approaches in our warehouse to remove:

• Surface Residues
• Odors
• Water Damage

How Do I Know My Items Are Safe? 

The Contents Claim Inventory Service (CCIS) ensures that we always have the right information about your possessions while they are in our care. While the pack-out and off-site recovery of your belongings might be inevitable after a fire, it can still be a challenge to hand control of these items over to our professionals. The CCIS approach documents everything about the items in our care from their value and placement in the house to detailed accounts of their damage.

Asset tracking and management are also services offered. At any point, we can show where one of your items is, what is actively happening with it, and grant you access to them whenever possible.

What Cleaning Do My Items Need? 

• Ultrasonic Immersion Tank – The immersion tank uses thousands of bubbles generated by vibrations to break soot and smoke residues loose on hard materials.
• Ozone Chamber – While ozone might be unsafe for use in homes when occupants or pets are still present, it remains one of the most efficient odor removal practices for our warehouse. We have a chamber to address an entire room's worth of contents simultaneously.
• Wipe Cleaning – We often rely on potent chemical agents and cleaning products. Wipe cleaning is a way to address immediate surface damages and residues but does nothing to impact any conditions beneath this surface layer.
• Drying – Water damage is one of the common compromising factors with structure fires because of extinguishing. In some cases, water damage can be more severe and threatening than soot, odors, and other fire loss effects. 
• Safe Storage – Once restoration completes on the items in our care, we can safely store them in our climate-controlled facility. Whenever restoration completes, we can move these items back to their original positions. 

Fire losses can be stressful and overwhelming, especially when it comes to recovering the individual items and contents in your house that matter the most to you. Our SERVPRO of Waterbury team can help with nearly all aspects of restoration and recovery as soon as we arrive. Give us a call anytime at (203) 757-5050.