What Happens to Flood-Damaged Contents in My Wilmington Home?

6/21/2020 (Permalink)

Act quickly when your home floods. Our technicians will dry out your property and remediate the damage.

Your belongings are a valuable asset that should get protected as soon as professionals arrive to restore your flood-damaged property. 

There are many priorities of responding technicians when flooding occurs in a Wilmington home. From the potential for contamination to structural damages, our SERVPRO team must carefully address each of the pressing loss effects to make flooding “Like it never even happened.” We have skilled technicians accredited through the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) in many areas, including structural drying, water restoration, biohazard cleaning, and more.

Among the chief concerns of our professionals addressing the flood damage in your Wilmington residence is the effect that the disaster has on its contents. Your personal belongings and possessions are some of the keys to making your house a home, and when these items are damaged, it can be a stressful experience for the occupants of the house. We have many useful methods for cleaning and restoring these affected contents, and this process typically begins with a thorough assessment of the damage during our job scoping phase.

How Do Personal Belongings Get Assessed After a Loss?

Initially, our professionals, like the project manager and crew chief, can work together to identify damages to the structure and its contents. Careful inspections here can ensure that affected materials and items get the attention that they need. Surface inspections and evaluations can often be the first action taken to determine if cleaning and recovery steps are necessary. In addition to the surface inspection, we can identify more substantial damages by looking more closely at the possessions, furniture, and textiles with moisture detection tools and thermal imagery.

What On-Site Recovery Solutions Exist?

Our responding content management technicians always focus on restoring and cleaning items in Wilmington on-site rather than pursuing alternative recovery approaches like the pack-out procedure. In many ways, if the migrating effects do not damage the present belongings in the affected areas of the home, there are specific practices that can clear surface residues and prevent the relocation of your possessions.

• Surface Cleaning – Cleaning residues, dirt, and mud from your possessions in the house might be an efficient way to inspect these items for further damages like saturation or odors.
• Deodorization – Flooding threats often come with foul odors, especially when some of these contents were exposed to standing water for extended periods. We have several tools that can help remove odors, including thermal fogging, hydroxyl generators, or ozone machines. 
• Drying – Flood effects can leave your possessions saturated or damp from the high moisture content in the damaged areas of the house. With air movers, dehumidifiers, and other drying tools, we can help remove the trapped water in your belongings.

What is the Pack-Out Process?

In some situations, the damage to the contents of your home is too significant to restore these items where they get found. Instead, our team works to carefully remove these belongings and catalog their placement in the house. Once loaded onto our SERVPRO Green Fleet vehicles, your possessions make their way to our nearby facility for focused cleaning, drying, and other restorative approaches. Some of the phases of restoration in our warehouse include:

• Drying
• Deodorization
• Surface Cleaning
• Safe Storage

What is the Move-Back Process?

When the work ends in the house and flood damage has gotten successfully recovered, we can remove your items from their climate-controlled storage in our care and prepare them for their return into your restored property. Even this move-back process involves specific steps to ensure that we do not miss a more significant issue with the recovered belongings in our possession.

• Completion of Restoration – The first of the phases of the move back involves completing the restoration work in the house following a flood. From drying and cleaning, there are many steps necessary to restore the home, and your items cannot get returned to the residence without addressing these damaging conditions.
• Staging – In the days leading into the return of your belongings, our SERVPRO professionals stage these restored contents in groupings based on where they are getting returned. This process also allows us to get a final look at all of the items to inspect them for missed moisture or flood damages.
• Placement – Once our content technicians determine that the items are back to their preloss conditions, move-back can begin. We return removed belongings to their original positions in the house. 

Protecting your belongings is critical to the restoration and recovery work that we can do for your home after a flood. No matter how we can help, give our SERVPRO of Brandywine / Wilmington team a call at (302) 762-8080.