吃瓜不打烊

Welcome, So welcome to our fire and smoke restoration boot camp. Thank you again for joining us. My name is Kristen. I’m the event specialist here at 吃瓜不打烊. We’ll cover topics such as capturing documentation, passing liability, proper cleaning steps, unique contents and so much more. This webinar is eligible for IACRC continuing education credits. So without further ado, I will pass it over to Chris. Hey. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. And to the Aussies, they’re sitting there at the middle of the night, thanks for getting up and coming out. Hey. I wanna thank you guys. I know that some of you guys are doing watch parties. I got a few emails saying that you have the entire teams in. I I still think that’s the coolest thing that you guys pull them in off the field. I won’t disappoint you. We’ll get started, and we’ll go through it. Little change of format. Normally, I got a wingman with me, someone who’s on the call this year running solo. So we’re gonna have a little bit more time for q and a. Just I I’m making the assumption we’re gonna fly a little faster through the PowerPoint with less dialogue. So more question and answer time. We’re gonna put a little extra time there. We’re also spend a little bit more time on the poll so it’s a little bit more relevant to what you guys are working on. And today, we’re gonna cover off a few of these. Let me get the PowerPoint fired up so we’re running. The goals of fire restoration, a lot of questions. There was a I can’t remember how many questions we had. I’m gonna say over a hundred about, like, how do you start the job off right? So the goals of fire restoration, added to it to kinda answer those questions. We have the new s seven hundred standard, the new s seven sixty. We’ll just touch on that because they didn’t get published. Last year at the, when we did this, we thought they would be published by March, and they’re still in, in editing and going through that. We’re gonna go through field documentation. So this is a touch on why you would do 吃瓜不打烊 or why you would use 吃瓜不打烊, to document your jobs, but more so why is it important to your process of getting paid. A lot of questions on on, hey. How do we get paid? How do we, do we work with our adjusters? How do we convince our adjusters to that this is worth it? Then we go through the four steps of remediation. Little bit of a fundamental on the techno or on the technicals, but a little different perspective of looking at your fire damage jobs, which would keep you, with less liability. That should make you more money, or it should be easier to justify what you’re doing. We have source removal cleaning, and so we get into those steps, odor control and the use of encapsulants. Then we go through, are you ready for rebuild? Just looking at some jobs that that I’ve been out to, we’ve got a couple of the billionaires experience. I shared that story last year. I’ve got another one that we’re gonna talk a little bit more on contents and working with adjusters. A lot of your questions were around contents. How do we justify contents? What happens when the adjuster directs me on what to do? I’m gonna share with you guys a little bit of a case study. I didn’t do any PowerPoints for it, but it’ll be more of a discussion, and that should answer some of those questions. And then we’re gonna talk about how you can sell yourself, using fire and flood restoration. A lot of people were in saying, hey. I just got my training, or we’re just looking to fire up a a fire division, and we wanna understand how you would go about that. So this we’ll touch on a little bit of that, and then we’re gonna do the long question answer period at the end. Hopefully, we make it easier so that along the way, we’re gonna answer your questions. Let’s get started. We start with the first poll. What is the primary objective of fire restoration? And you guys have an option to put this in. Restore the property to an agreed condition, remove the contaminants and odors of the fire process, restore water and heat damaged materials, all the above, or follow the instructions of the adjuster. And so we’re getting those in. A lot of you guys are going to all of the above. Some of you are are focused on remove the contaminants, remove the restore the property to an agreed condition. I like this. This is all coming in. Lots of participation. Hey. Everything that we do on the polls, nobody can see but but me, and I can’t see who did it. So you guys can always answer honestly or answer the way you think it should be, and no one’s gonna call you out. Few people put follow the the instructions of the adjusters. It’s good to see we have some adjusters on the call. Alright. Kristen, if you wanna end that one, we’ll figure out those results. And so we’ve got restore the property is eight percent. Remove the contaminants and odor process is eight percent. And then a bunch of you said all of above, restore water and heat damaged materials. And then follow the instructions, the adjusters. We had six six adjusters. Come on, guys. What what’s interesting here is fire damage is a lot about getting into repairing what’s there, but we don’t normally approach the process that way. We don’t approach it in a in a systematic format. We show up to jobs, and we respond. And what we typically see is that we get in there and try to deal with everything without thinking about the goal or the objective of what we’re doing. And I want you to change your mind because as a technician or project manager, if you establish the objective at the beginning, then it makes it easier to get paid at the end. So if you’re going through and you’re you’re having a discussion around this I just gotta get this off my screen. If we’re going through the, the objective and you talk about the objective, it’s like having a drying plan. If you talk about the what the goals of the the water damage drying plan are, then we can see if we met those objectives. Same thing with fire damage. So when we look at this, I’d look at it this way. The objective is to restore. And if you come in here and say, our objective is to restore, and you finish the sentence, heat damage, smoke damage, and any water damage to the structure and contents, well, now what we’re doing is we’re entering a process flow. Can we restore it? So can it be restored, or does it need to be replaced? Everything that you touch inside a building has to go through those terms. If it’s drywall, can it be restored, or does it need to be replaced? Contents, if you start to look at things that way, which is if it’s heated up, is it permanently damaged? If it’s permanently damaged, can you reverse the damage? In most cases, you cannot. So that automatically has to be replaced. Then we look at it and say it’s water damage. Now is it permanently water damaged, temporarily water damaged? Is it porous? Is it nonporous, semi porous? How is the water gonna impact that material? If it’s impacted by fire damaged, water, are you gonna be able to restore it? So it’s kinda like the similar to cat three discussion. Right? If it’s been water with contaminants, we can’t restore it. We can’t get the contaminants out of the porous material. We replace it. This is a pretty important discussion that we have to start off with if we’re gonna walk down this path with an adjuster or with a homeowner. The next thing we look at is we look at the contents and say, well, what are we doing with contents? Can we restore it? So the answer is we can. Should we restore it? So if we’re dealing with, like, baby items, infants, maybe we don’t go down that path. The next part of this is that we would get in here. We do that by removing contaminants that cause odors and that pose a health risk to occupants. So when we get in and we start smelling smoke, a lot of us are dropping gear immediately because the industry has told us, hey. We should get rid of that smoke odor. But that smoke odor is a byproduct of a contaminant. Shouldn’t we be removing the contaminant first, focusing on contaminant removal, then we’ll focus on odor removal. After we’ve cleaned all surfaces, we then can deal with the odors. What I’m seeing as an umpire and in appraisal, so in dispute resolutions, I’m seeing that most of the disputes are coming from people that attack the odor without dealing with the contaminant. And so the contaminant is leading to corrosion or the contaminant leads to, VOCs being in the house that are dangerous to the occupants. When we start to see that, it’s usually that someone attacked the odor first, not the contaminant. Then we look at what’s there that poses a health risk. So if we have a dirty environment, you we’re gonna get into this when we talk about odor control. But when you got a dirty environment, the actions you take could lead to more health risks to the occupants. And so we already have a health risk from the fire contaminants. Never mind if we were to go in and add in the stuff that we do. And then I’m so sorry to interrupt. There’s just there’s a gray bar over the presentation. Is there? Well, let’s get that. We want everyone to get the full experience. That one. K. Well, that’s that’s fair. Let me see what we can do with that. How’s that? Fixed? Oh, way better. Thank you. Alright. Sorry, guys. Alright. We got that screen fixed. We’re there. Perfect. Yeah. There you go, Amanda. Alright. Now the next thing we look at is is our goal is to restore the property to an agreed condition. It has to be sanitary. So there’s kind of two things. The sanitary condition is that we’re working on the restoration side. If you look at the mitigation, the fire restoration, we’re trying to get the building to a sanitary condition where anyone can come in and repair it. The agreed condition is how are those repairs gonna take place? How is the paint gonna look? How is the carpet gonna look? What’s the wood finishes look like when we’re done? And do we have to then do some resurfacing to get them back into a better condition than they were before the loss, or is it acceptable to leave them the way they are? Now when we look at that, it’s ultimately an insurance question that comes in place is then we work with adjusters, but we don’t follow their instructions. Now I just had a large contents loss that was a large contents and building loss, over six hundred thousand dollars in in damage, where the adjuster gave direction to the restorers on how to do the work. And the result was that they never had any training. So they were telling a restorer what to do based on fifteen, twenty years of experience in the industry with no technical knowledge of of doing the work. And what happened is is in that process, I interviewed the, we you you bring the the witnesses in. So you bring the adjuster in, and both representatives get to grill them. It’s like a quasi court. And, so we we go through that process, and the question is, what training do you have in fire damage? And the answer is I’ve never had training in fire damage, but you change the scope of work. You’re not able to change the scope of work. You have no knowledge. And so in that event, the contractor ultimately was responsible for holding the bag. If it goes to a court, someone’s gonna have to pay and multiple parties will probably pay, but the restorer was the one with the experience that was supposed to know. And so when you look at it, the adjuster is there. Their job is to manage the insurance policy. So you have to understand the the the the job of them is is an administrative function. Is the loss covered? Yes or no? Is the value of the loss good or bad? Is it is it appropriate or not? Which money like, which reserve is this coming out of? That’s what’s important for the adjuster. How to physically do the work? They haven’t actually restored property. So in most cases, they haven’t. Some some restorers have made the transition, but even then, they’re not in that role. That you have to hang up your restorers hat and put on your adjuster’s hat and say, okay. I’m gonna do this. So be very careful when you get into a restoration job. This conversation is critical to you having a good job going forward. It literally is the start where you’re saying, our goal is to return the building to a sanitary condition. Here’s the acceptable appearances of these materials that we’re gonna clean. We’re either gonna clean them and leave them the way they are, or we’re gonna then further them on in the reconstruction process. That’s an easy communication to an adjuster so that they know what expectations are coming down the pipe when you say, hey. I need to get paid for what I did. We’re gonna get into detail here, but that is effectively what we’re doing when we when we have this discussion at the beginning. The next thing we do, we remove the contaminants of the fire. And what’s interesting here is this is where most most restorers get really focused on the particulate, so the heavy contaminants that you can see. Those ones, yeah, we can clean them. It’s the microscopic contaminants that lead to more odor. So there was a question that came in, during the, in the registration. And I said, you know, how do I deal with odors when I when they’re still there after we’re done cleaning? You haven’t got them. Like, that’s just they’re either in the material. So if it was a hot fire, they got in the material. Or they’re in pockets or they’re in seams or they’re under baseboards. You haven’t found the odor. And so the more odor control you do in the process, the harder it is to find the contaminant. To the point where you’re gonna leave contaminants behind, they might come back when the humidity levels go up, or they might come back when the heat gets higher in the building. So you’re gonna your goal is at the beginning, deal with those contaminants. The easiest time to find them is when they’re fresh. And I’ve had jobs where we’ve gone back. We did a seniors home. We had to go back and and take a roof off because that seniors home had smoke that was left in there. We dealt with the odor first. We left the contaminant behind, and the contaminant then caused more problems after the entire rebuild was done. That was a multi hundred thousand dollar loss that we had to eat because we didn’t do the job right. So these are the things that come when you don’t follow the right process at the beginning. The next thing we have is wire damaged materials. So heat is nonreversible, and and I’m gonna show you some photos as we go through where we normally look at, like, a smoke line and go, that’s that’s the heat line. No. That’s the smoke line. The heat line is much different. And in some cases in a hot fire, that heat line is coming all the way to the floor. And so that’s when you’re gonna get into a question of, can you restore it? If it’s heat damaged, normally, you can’t. Things that are heat damaged, sometimes you could restore the surface on them, but you have to be very careful that that they haven’t been compromised. The big one is drywall. Drywall is gonna be one that we’ll talk about and we’ll get into. And then water damage, how do you treat fireman’s water? Well, it’s got contaminants in there. Is it a category three? It’s not necessarily classed as a category three. It’s classed as a hazardous regulated material, but your processes will be very similar to a category three process. So you’re gonna be doing the restoration. You’ll be taking out wet and damaged contaminated materials that way. Fireman’s water, would treat more like a category three. Does that make sense? Alright. So the other problem we run into is our terminology. Pre loss condition is something we picked up from the insurance industry, but it’s not necessarily our term. We’re gonna restore something to pre loss. Now back in, like, the seventeenth hundred, seventeenth century when they were insuring ships, they would use the term pre loss to be like, hey. You’re sending this ship with cargo across the ocean. Pre loss is that we’ll get you a ship about the same age, and we’ll replace the cargo. That’ll put you into your pre loss condition. That was the premise of insurance back then, and that term has effectively stayed with the insurance industry, because it’s just part of their culture, their nomenclature, way they speak about, policies and insurance. For us, are we really restoring it back to pre loss condition? We have to look at it. What was the pre loss condition before the fire? Was it ten year old carpet? Was it fifteen year old carpet? Was it drywall with twenty layers of paint on it? Is that what we’re gonna restore the building back to? Or are we not doing pre loss condition? Are we just coming back to an acceptable condition or an agreed condition that we’re now agreeing to? Like, hey. You’re gonna get fresh paint. You’re gonna get new drywall. That’s not pre loss. So you wanna get away from pre loss because that’s an insurance term, and you wanna start talking about the actual goal of getting your job back to to the starting point. So your starting point might be, we have twenty year old drywall, with five or six layers of paint. We’re gonna be putting new drywall in with three layers of paint. We have plaster lath and plaster on the walls. We’re gonna replace that with drywall. That might not be acceptable. They may say, no. We would like lath and plaster back. That’s a different conversation. So you’re gonna your goal is just to hit that hit those marks and get it in there. I would I would argue that pre loss is is a is a discussion that you need to or sorry. It’s a term that you should get out of your your business and just start using to what is the acceptable condition. It’s sanitary, and the contaminants have been removed. And then what is the acceptable condition that we’re restoring the building to? Once we determine that, it’s your scope of work. Once you have your scope of work, then we’re basically going in and executing. And you should get paid if you execute it on an agreed scope of work. So that change of language means that you don’t have to get into the whole insurance terminology and understanding. Just avoid it. Now one of the other reasons that came in, and I missed this point, was was replacement cost. So the new policies the old policy said, hey. You’re gonna get a a ship to replace a ship of the same age. Today’s policies have replacement costs. So if this cup gets damaged by fire, I’ll get a brand new one if I can’t clean it. And so the insurance carriers get this, ability in the contract. Almost all the contracts have a wording, and it says that they have the option to replace the item or they have the option to repair it at a lesser cost. So they take a gamble. If they attempt to repair something, let’s say they go to re repair the cup, you they say, hey, guys. You gotta come and clean the cup, but you can’t clean the lid. Can we replace the lid in the straw? Yeah. You can buy that separately. But can you clean the cup? Maybe. Try it. Yeah. It’s successful. We cleaned the cup. Perfect. Now we’ll just replace the plastic on there, but the cup is clean. That’s reducing their cost. The insurance carrier has in their contract the ability to do that. The homeowners could say, I drink out of that cup. I’m not accepting that back. And the homeowner has a right, and that’s where the adjuster and the contractor will negotiate or sorry. The adjuster and the homeowner will negotiate. And you say, I can restore it. Should I restore it? Well, if the homeowner is not taking it back, probably not. That’s for an adjuster and a homeowner to have the discussion, and then you execute on whether it’s safe to do. And if it is, then you could perform the service. Or if someone’s not gonna accept it, you just say, hey. They’re not gonna accept my service, or are you gonna pay me to do it? And then you guys will deal with the the fallout. That happens all the time. Sometimes homeowners don’t want something. We restore it anyway, and we shouldn’t because it’s not gonna be accepted. Alright. Here’s a big one. You’re not an insurance company. So when we look at this, this is just how if you if I was explaining this to a technician, here’s how I would explain it, is we’ve got the mitigation process. Our goal is that sanitary condition. As a project manager, I’m gonna tell the homeowner, during the cleanup here, we’re gonna get you to a sanitary condition. We’re gonna remove the contaminants. We’re gonna find out the cause, which is the contaminants that cause odor, and we’re gonna remove those. And then anything that’s, like, microscopically left where there seems like we’re framing meets or maybe we’re just you know, we just can’t get to it. And financially, it’s not economical to attack that order. It’s not big enough for us to take a wall apart. Hey. We’re gonna try some of our older odor controlled methods at that point. And then we’re gonna get the order removed. And at that point, we have a home that you can come back to, and we could put any contractor in. There’s a trend right now that in mitigation, companies are leaving the job half finished, and they’re asking contractors to bid out the finish of the mitigation. So if I start the mitigation and I get the water damage, dealt with, and then I do some some structural cleaning by I do some of the demo, but I don’t clean it up. And then you as a next contractor come in and you take it over. If I put hydroxyl or ozone on a job before you did the work or I put a cleaning chemical in the job before you put your equipment in and there’s a problem that occurs, who’s responsible? Who’s responsible to get the building back to a sanitary condition? Neither one of you is gonna be responsible. You might be held responsible. You might go to court for it. You might be sued for it. But who’s responsible if you’ve only done half the job? So in a mitigation, your goal is to get it so that it’s ready for rebuild. Insurance companies take on a lot of risk, and res restores, we take on a lot of risk if we go down that path where you’re only doing half the mitigation. You should be responsible for making sure there’s no smoke odor and contaminants left in the building, and that’s when we turn it over to rebuild. In Canada right now, we’re seeing smoke and soot on walls, and they’re turning it over to a rebuild contractor. They’re not. They may have a a three day FSRT training. They’re not qualified to do the fire restoration because all they’re doing is sealing it into the walls. They’re not following the standards. So you’re gonna see the legal side. And and what the problem was, we didn’t have standards. So now we have standards coming out. That’s gonna change things. That’s gonna change things for the entire industry. The restoration side of our industry is now has a standard like the five hundred. You have something to be accountable to. On the insurance side, they have something to be accountable to as well. But once you get this job to a sanitary condition, your restoration is to get to the agreed condition. That’s just easy. What was the agreed condition? Old drywall for new. What was the agreed condition? Old paint for new. It might be if you were to look at it this way, what if we had a, what if we had a job where where they wanted like like, a mural was on a wall? So under normal conditions, we would go and paint the drywall. But today, because there’s a mural on the wall, they’re like, hey. Don’t paint over it. Just clean it, and we’re okay with scuff marks on there, and we’re okay with the the smear marks. The mural is more important. Well, the agreed condition is you it’s it’s gonna have some marks from the cleaning process. That’s okay. That’s fine as long as it’s in a sanitary condition. Does that make sense? Alright. Let’s go let’s go on. So here’s one that that you’ll see in, and this is an extreme example, but it’s one that you could then wrap your head around on normal contents items. And that’s when you look at different type of of work. So these are, artwork that was in Winnipeg. They were on the Chief Peguis Trail, so they’re outdoor art. When they were created, there’s these large they’re the size of a desk. Like, they’re they’re massive. They’re probably seven, eight foot long, statues, and they’re they stand very high. They were exposed to weather. They weren’t supposed to be exposed to the road salts. And so the road salts greened them out really hard. Now when you do restoration, what are you restoring this wolf back to? Is it the new condition? Is it the prior to the lost weathered condition? And it makes a difference. Now when you’re talking contents, you’re actually talking something along the same lines. Is it gonna be like new, or is it gonna still have paint chips and everything else to there, but it’s gonna be clean? That’s why you need to use your terminology very carefully. There’s three states that you basically come into. You get into a new state, so it has to be like new. Pretty hard on content. It’s a little easier on building materials. Then your next state is before the loss. So it’s gonna have the same dense things, scratches as before the loss, but it’s gonna be in a clean sanitary condition. Or it’s at some point before the fire, not necessarily pre loss, but not necessarily new. Those are your three conditions of restorability. And then the one you got on the end is it’s still contaminated, and you can have it back. We did our best job to to sanitize it, but we didn’t get it there. You’re gonna be looking at different types of items, not necessarily like this, but this is the extreme. If all of a sudden that that wolf got category three water on it or was in a fire, and we had to remove the fire or the soot damage from it or the heat damage on it, what level would we restore back to? It’d be pretty hard to get it back to the weathered look. It’d probably be a lot easier to get it back to the new look. So is that acceptable? And if you’re dealing with artwork, it depends on the artist’s intent. But if you’re dealing with the customer, it’s like, hey. I know it’s weathered. That’s how it was that’s how you had it. When we’re done with it, it’s gonna look new. Is that okay? And if the answer is no, then you’re gonna have to find a different solution. Right? So you have to have those conversations. But once it’s agreed to, you know what the target is. And if it doesn’t get to there, that’s okay. That’s the best ability you had. Maybe you bring in an expert, maybe you don’t. When we talk about buildings, this is another one where we’re talking about pre loss versus new. There’s your pre loss. If you use the term we’re gonna restore this building to pre loss, that is pre loss. Are you gonna green the top of this building? Because that’s new. So if we’re talking about the building and you use the terminology pre loss, your terminology has already set you up for failure. If you’re like, hey. The condition is we’re gonna replace the roof, and it’s gonna be copper, and it’s gonna be new, and it’s gonna have a coppery shine to it for a few years till it weathers, I don’t know if it’s gonna weather to the same law as the pre loss, roof, but this is how we’re gonna have to repair it. Is there an oxidization process that you can apply to that copper to get it to look like the other copper roof? I don’t know. Maybe. Probably is. Is that what you want me to apply to the to the material? You all you have to do is set it up and then let the adjuster determine if they can pay for it and let the building owner determine if that’s what they wanna do. Just find agreement. It’s all communication. Everything that we see in disputes is a failure to communicate from the start. Like, a hundred percent of the time, it is you failed to communicate what you were gonna do. You failed to communicate the potential You failed to communicate the results you expected. And at the end, there’s a dispute that comes from that. As a contractor, you’re ultimately responsible for the path that you take a client down. All you’re looking to the insurance company, if you really wanna simple it down, all the insurance company is is there for is determining how much they’re gonna pay. Are they paying for the the building? Are they paying for your services? Do they is there exclusions? Hey. Half this roof is worth covering. The other half, the insured has to cover. Okay. Then you have to collect your money from them. Does it make sense? That’s really what we’re looking at when we talk insurance. It’s just clearly define the scope, clearly define the expectations. Alright. I’m not gonna beat that horse anymore because that one leads does smoke damage change our process? So we have we live in a world where right now insurance companies want to get a lot of our projects bid out, and they moved the bid process from the big repairs to the smaller repairs, and now they want the mitigation to be be bid out. Give us a a hard price. You have to know what you’re doing if you’re gonna do that. Now it’s really hard to bid out fires. It it’s it’s hard to bid out water damage. It’s hard to bid out trauma. The reason why is sorry. And trauma is a little easier than the other two because the other two, fire and water, have things that you’re gonna discover as you go. You’re gonna have inefficiencies from things that burned in a fire or different types of contaminants to get on water. It’s just the way our industry works. When you know the efficiency, I know how long it takes to paint a wall. If I paint a hundred walls that are ten by ten, I will tell you within a very small amount of time what the difference is between my best wall and my worst wall. Can you do that with fire? It is really hard. And the reason why is fire has two different types of smoke. And if you don’t know that going into the fire and you think that you’re dealing with a dry smoke and you’re dealing with a wet smoke, you’re in for a really bad estimate. So when we start looking at profitability, we look at efficiencies. When we look at efficiencies, we go, what type of smoker we own? And you have to know that going in. And then on top of that, there’s also other things. So where did the smoke come from? Is it a plastic or a natural? Was it a a high heat burn or a low heat burn? Was it starved of oxygen? Depending on what we look at, how are you gonna bid it if you don’t even know what you’re looking at for the type of smoke that you dealt with? So you can go in. I I’ve got some videos that I I’m I’m gonna be putting up. I was playing around with a a wood stove and playing around with with getting wood. So a natural material like wood, you can make wet. You can get a a really wet smoke out of out of wood. You can also get a dry smoke out of wood. You can get a wet smoke out of synthetics, but it’s harder to get a wet smoke out of synthetics because of their their combustion temperature that it takes to get them up to a clean burn. And with synthetics, there’s no real clean burns. You get a bunch of nasty stuff that comes out of them. Wood’s the same way. We love bonfires. Lot of carcinogenics in bonfire wood from just the wood burning, but we accept that risk. And the reason why is there’s a low dose. It’s outside. If it’s in your fireplace, you’re getting exposed to carcinogenics, but the risk is low. The dose is low. On synthetics, the dose could be low, but the impact could be high. And so you have to start thinking about what are we restoring. So if we get into a wet smoke fire, one of the things is that, hey. Wet smoke is is usually considered a cold smoke or a cold fire. Well, that’s kind of a little bit of oxymoron, isn’t it? Like, it’s not a cold fire. Fire’s hot. When we look at this, we go, okay. What is happening? Well, it’s in the early stage. Typically, a wet smoke is in the, they call it the incendiary or the ignition stage. So during the ignition, you’re gonna have a fire that starts. Now it’s normally a smolder. So there’s enough heat to create smoke, but not enough heat to create a hot fire. You might get a little bit of a flame, and and it it’s like when you light a candle. At the beginning of lighting a candle, you’ll see that black smoke come up. And then when the candle gets going, it gets to a clean a clean burn. Now there’s still smoke coming out, but it’s not smoke you can see. It’s very fine. But when you first light a candle, you get that black smoke off the candle. That’s because that’s that incomplete burn that’s happening. Same thing happens with wood or plastic. So when we start looking at wood at cold smoke, it’s an incomplete fire, incomplete combustion. So you go from the initial ignition, haven’t even got into growth yet, or maybe you’re just getting into the growth stage of fire. And so what we start looking is that incomplete combustion. Well, that’s when you’re getting all this big, thick, heavy contaminants, all these big soot and and combustibles that are are landing inside your building. Those are gonna be a different clean than a dry smoke. Synthetics, so during this this one dispute, we had people talking about it was a protein fire. They were talking about looking for for smoke webs. And because there was no smoke webs, that meant that there was no fire. Okay. But we’re not talking about synthetics. We’re talking about protein. There will be no smoke webs in a protein fire. Smoke webs are a sign. It’s basically the molecules that are becoming energized that then link together, and they create these webs. You’ve seen them if you’ve been in the industry long enough. You’ll see the smoke webs. That’s a a sign that you have a synthetic. If you have a synthetic, you have a wet smoke. If you have a wet smoke, you have four to six times longer to clean. It could be longer than six times or longer than four times. It’s just gonna take you long, and you have to figure out what type of job am I looking at. Synthetic combustibles generally are wet smoke. There’s a really strong pungent odor. Why? Incomplete combustion, you have that particle. The particle is bigger. It’s got more charring inside the particle. It’s not fully com combusted. It’s got a strong odor. If you walk into a building and you’re like, hey. That’s a pretty light odor. It may have been a dry smoke, not a wet smoke. Does that make sense? Is that helpful for what you guys are doing? If I start smelling a strong odor with not a lot of, signs, I’m probably thinking I got bigger clean than I I should, that I can expect. So that’s how I would start gauging this. The larger particles are greasier. So, wet smoke will have a a smudge effect to it. It’ll come off kind of like that greasy, oily, particulate. You would have seen it. Now you could still HEPA vac it. You should pull it off the surface as opposed to spread it. Your goal is to HEPA vac that stuff off and try to get it down so it’s not doing damage to the surfaces, and you’re not embedding that greasy material into fabrics or into the materials you’re trying to clean. K? Alright. The smearing, which is every adjuster or homeowner comes in and wants to smear that that oh, what let’s see what it looks like. Well, when you do that, you can do the smear test, but that smear is starting to push that particulate into that material. And we got dry smoke. So dry smoke is from a hotter burn. As a general rule, the the fire burns really well. If you were to look at a bonfire, just use a bonfire and and one source wood. If you were to do a bonfire where you put a piece of wood in, if the wood is just getting started and you’re starting to burn, you get all this smoke that comes off the wood. When the fire gets really going, there’s almost no smoke. It’s a very light smoke. There’s a lot of oxygen going in. And if you were to take a leaf blower to your fire where there’s a little bit of smoke and just put a leaf blower on your fire, all that smoke is gonna disappear because you’re gonna heat up that fire, and all those cooler edges that are burning a little bit colder where they’re smoking are gonna then combust, and you’ll have a clean fire. So that’s why you’re seeing a nice clean wood burn usually has a lot of oxygen. Take that into the house. All of a sudden, you have a large fire. Chances are you’re probably dealing with a hotter burn. But with fires, it’s kinda like a drying chamber. As you walk through a house, let’s let’s say in this picture here, we have one room that was really intense. So that one room’s fire was really hot and the fire spread to another room. That other room might be a cold smoke. And so maybe you’re burning some synthetics at a lower temperature. Some of the house is gonna be that wet greasy smoke, and some of it’s gonna be a dry smoke from the high intensity. Where the high intensity is, probably you’re doing more remove and replace as opposed to cleaning, if that makes sense. Okay? So, typically, I’m gonna say you’re gonna find more cleaning in the greasy fires because that’s where you have more incomplete combustion. Alright. A dry particulate. You’ll see this with wood. Wood ash is dry. If you were to vacuum it up, you’d almost leave nothing behind. Whereas if you were to look at, like, a sap, if you ever burned a sap, it’s it’s it’s a residue. That would be more like your greasy your greasy burn. Protein fires is the one that’ll trip up everybody. And so far, I’m gonna say this is probably sixty percent of the fire damage that I I I dispute or I’m an umpire or I’m an appraiser on. About sixty percent of them are protein fires because they’re done wrong. And they’re just flat up hard to do because visually, they look like there’s nothing there. So when we look at a protein fire, this is a special case. This this usually gets restorers into trouble because everyone walks in, and the biggest thing they’ll do is they’ll do this. Yep. Nothing here. Yep. Nothing here. Nothing here. Look. There’s there’s nothing. It gets treated like it’s a dry smoke fire. And when you deal with this, this is an oily residue that’s left behind. Your what type of combustion do you have on on a turkey or a chicken or chicken soup that’s burnt? What do you have? You have an you have an incomplete. You have an ignition fire happening. You have the most incomplete combustion happening. So you’re getting the biggest particles that are coming off of that. Your combustion products are smoky, not fire, so it’s cold. The residue is an oil or grease. It’s fats. It’s proteins they’re burning off, and those create an oily substance. So when we start to look at this and we say, well, what are we actually, running here? Well, we’re looking for a clear yellow brown or pinkish, hue on on surfaces. A little particulate of of protein is gonna have a massive amount of odor. Your your oxidizers are not as effective on this. So going in just saying, hey. I can’t see it, so therefore, I’m gonna hit it with an oxidizer. They’re not effective on it. One of the other things you run into is that the texture is tacky. It’s greasy. So you might see it on a wall. If you took we’ll get in the the cloth test. But if you took a cloth and you wiped it across the surface, would it show up on your on your cloth? Well, with that grease, it might not. You might need to put, an alcohol on it to to attack that greasy substance so that you can get a sign on a white cloth. Is that the best way? Well, you have odor, so you already know you have a problem. After about twenty four to seventy two hours, that greasy tacky texture changes, and it turns into more of a shellac like material. It hardens. And when it hardens, it becomes harder to clean. So the longer you leave a protein fire to sit, which a lot of times you’re getting in discussions with adjusters, it now re it requires more elbow grease to get rid of the the odor and the contaminant because it’s gone to a harder surface. So that becomes much more harder than even a wet smoke. Does that make sense? Have you guys done a lot of proteins where you’re where you’re trying to get the odor and you’re like, no. I’m losing this one. Right? That is super hard to get to. It’s because the odor is is a natural odor. It’s got the properties of it’s easier to clean when it’s fresh. It’s harder to clean when it’s old, and you can’t see it. Like, you’re gonna have to clean everything. And the problem with that is every adjuster goes in thinking this is just a light damage. No. If you were to look at the smoke, smoke particulate could fill this room. You couldn’t see across the room. Smoke dissipates. You won’t see any really residues on anything that they’ll just be covered in that protein y smell. And so those contaminants, have to clean. You have to clean everything. It’s as much as a big fire. If you had a synthetic fire with lots of plastics, it would be the same thing, but you can see the plastics. Does that make sense? That strong pungent odor is what you’re gonna be trying to deal with. And the problem that we’ve seen is that restorers will put copious amounts of oxidizers in and create other problems trying to get to an odor that’s not really that impacted by an oxidizer. Ozone’s better than hydroxyl, but it’s still not your number one choice. Your number one choice is just remove it. The most effective removal is physical. It’s not hydroxyls. Hydroxyls you put hydroxyls in, you are oxidizing everything but what you’re trying to oxidize. So get in there. It’s elbow grease. It’s it’s again, what are we doing? Hey. We’ve got this contaminant. It’s got a really bad odor. The only way to remove it is for us to clean it. So there’s gonna be a lot of cleaning on this bill. If we don’t clean it, you’re gonna be replacing items, mister adjuster or missus adjuster. That’s the discussion you have at the beginning. What’s the agreed level of clean? It’s a detailed clean. How are we cleaning things like books that are holding odor? We’re replacing books. So we watched I watched the entire building of paper materials be left where they took things that were like fabrics and said, hey. The fabrics have to go to a dry cleaner, but the books were left in the building, and they couldn’t figure out why the smell was there. You didn’t get rid of the odor trapped porous materials. So that’s where they run into problems. Proteins are super hard. And then because we treat them sometimes, like, they’re a dry fire where it’s like, hey. We’ll just get in there and do, like, a light clean, put some equipment in. Those were the ones that usually lead to more problems, and then they reoccur. The building heats up, the humidity heats up, and all of a sudden you get that smell back. It’s because you never cleaned. And so you have to clean if you wanna get the protein odors gone. That’s where the adjuster cut the scope and said, yeah. The you know, there’s no physical damage. Only the rooms with carpets are getting a detailed clean. The rooms with hardwoods don’t need one. Alright. Well, you just failed. Like, you literally are gonna have problems going forward. Hey. The contents need a light wipe. No. The contents need a heavy wipe because we have a greasy surface. You’re gonna have to use your fire cleaners on there. You’re gonna have to run ultrasonics on there, not just give it a cursory wipe like you’re doing dishes. No. This is a this is a hard clean, but it just doesn’t look that way. And so when it doesn’t look that way, people then take it for granted and go, hey. Protein fires are cheaper. Protein fires are expensive. Don’t kid yourself. There’s no physical damage. There’s just a ton of cleaning. K. There’s a couple things that are coming up. I thought we would have these published by now. They’re they’re held up in a review process, and and as part of the development process. You’ve got this new standard coming out, the s seven hundred. So that’s for professional fire and smoke damage restoration. What is good about this is this is gonna finally put some some guardrails in place for you so that when you’re doing your fire and fire restoration, you’re gonna have sort of the same best practices that come out of the s five hundred built for fire. So we’re gonna have some supporting documentation you can take to adjusters to say is as a professional restorer, these are the steps I need to take. As a professional restorer, this is how I’m documenting the job. It’s gonna help you with some of those guardrails. What is it also gonna do? It’s gonna expose some of the things that are are there. Use of oxidizers before you clean. That’s an emphasis that’s in there. Documenting, photo documenting, documenting your loss, identifying your scope of work. All of that is gonna be, more emphasized in communicating with the adjuster. So you’re gonna see the same thing that we do with water, now done with fire. The problem or not the problem. The challenge with this is there’s another standard here, which is the s seven sixty, which is a standard for professional wildfire investigations and restoration of impacts on structure, system, and contents. Now this is a little bit different. This standard covers the wildfire, and the smoke that goes down range of a wildfire will impact buildings and some of the contaminants that come along with that. Now those two standards may have some conflicts, and that’s why they’re they’re sitting in limbo here. They may have some conflicts where the fire standard committee did things that were a little different than the than the fire damage committee. So you got the wildfire committee and the fire committees that maybe did things from a different approach. And and so you’re gonna have two standards that weren’t written by the same people. It’s probably a good thing because it allows us to have conversations after these two are released, then we can come back and compare the two and and put it into the real world and see how they apply. But you have a standard for wildfires as well now, so you’re gonna have some guidelines on how to approach wildfires and something to support you as a restorer. So these will be important when they come out. I’ll let you know. These are a big deal. I think these are are a good change for the industry, and we’ve we haven’t had them. So it’s been the Wild West of fire. Alright. Where are we sitting here? Surface testing. We are emphasizing surface testing. So in the s seven hundred, this is something I think every one of you should do when you get to a fire is see what you’re dealing with. And there’s a few ways you can do this. Now I’m gonna show you pictures. The pictures I’m showing you are from losses that the restorer has already claimed that they have cleaned, and then we did some testing to see how things were. So you have a sponge wipe test. On here, this isn’t conclusive. All you’re doing is taking a sponge. You’re getting a controlled surface. So let’s say it’s a one foot by one foot surface. It’s it’s the same test in every room that you’re gonna do. You’re gonna grab your sponge, and you’re gonna run your sponge across the surface. And you’re gonna do, let’s say, a horizontal pass and then a vertical pass. So you’re effectively on that sponge and that surface area, you’re getting two feet of coverage. Right? One square foot horizontal, one square foot the same square foot vertical. In two square feet, you end up with a sample like that. Is that surface clean? Well, it has soils. We don’t know if they’re fire contaminants or not. But if the surface had been cleaned, I would not expect to see soils there. So I would say the surface was not clean. Right? When you do your initial sponge test, you can go over and show that you have a soil level like that. And because you have odor of smoke in the room and based on all the information, there was a lot of smoke in the room, we’re gonna clean the surfaces. Your next pass of that sponge on that same sample area should be a clean sponge. Does that make sense? That’s how you can use in the real world. It’s not scientific. There’s definitely smoke there. There’s a soil. But because we know we have a smoke contaminant, doesn’t matter whether it’s dirt or combustibles, we’re gonna clean it till it’s clean. You wanna document those test results. So if you’re documenting that, you wanna go in and actually show what’s happening. Here’s another one. This was a table lift. I was told that the entire basement was clean. We had a smoke odor, and we had some some VOCs that were impacting the occupants. To this day, that was two thousand nineteen, twenty? To this day, they can’t go back home. So it’s four or five years later, maybe even six years later, and that home is still vacant. That’s the contaminant that came off the pipe. So this is a tape lift. Nice thing about the tape lift is you could put the tape under a microscope and look for the particulate. So you can take a a digital microscope with you that you can plug into your phone. You put it on a table. You put your slide in there, and then you’ve got a four hundred I think it’s a four hundred zoom microscope that will hook into your phone so you can use your phone’s display and look at the particulate and see if it’s dust or fire or what are you looking for there. You can send those samples off to a lab. Again, if we have a smoke smell and I have a contaminant that comes off the pipe, they don’t really need to come in and determine if it is a contaminant. I’m cleaning that entire area because I’m cleaning the surfaces. I’m just validating that we have some kind of contaminant there. And then we can send it off for testing. I could talk to the adjuster. Say, hey. We’re gonna send this off for testing if you want it tested. If you’d like to save the cost on the testing, we’ll just clean it like it is fire. What would you like us to do? And let them make the determination of how they wanna spend their money. Right? That’s how I would work with an adjuster on that one. The white cloth test is another restore type of test. It’s an indicator. It’s a visual indicator. This, fireplace was cleaned multiple times. This house was cleaned actually three times before I went in there. And inside that fireplace, I went and did a white cloth test. Now I didn’t do a a square foot. I literally looked and went through a lot. In here, you can see where the edges are on the brain in here where the edges are. That was all not necessarily from the fire that happened on-site. It happened as a result of they didn’t clean the combustibles that were previously there. So if I have preexisting soils and I had a fire in the in the building, the preexisting soils could be carrying the smoke smell. They should have been removed. And the fact that they weren’t means that the building didn’t get a detailed clean. You might do ghosting. So if you walk into a building and you wanna see what’s there, my baba smoked in her house. And when we when when she passed away, we opened up the the pictures. And when you took the picture frames, you saw ghosting. This is this is common for smokers’ homes that you’ll see ghosting, but you’ll see it in other residents. Why? We have a particulate flying over during a fire, and it’s got some velocity. Now it’s microscopic velocity, but it’s gonna impact the surface of a painting and stick to that. And that that velocity or that traction bonds with the painting. That’s what the ghosting is, is you’re seeing it where the particulate’s not transferring into that wall. So that’s where the ghosting appears is the smoke is just bonding to the painting. Sometimes it’s really prevalent and sometimes not. What you could do is you could do a on the bottom where the ghost is, where the brown is, you could do one of your wipe tests there and then go up to where the painting was and do a wipe test up there to show the difference. And you could say, well, this is the wall where there was no painting, and here’s the wall where there was a painting. Do all your cleaning practices, and then show the go show where the wall was where there wasn’t a painting, and the after where there was a painting and show show the differences. Great physical demonstration that you did your job. Should you be paid? Yep. How many people show this? Next to nobody. So if you’re trying to get paid, why did you put four hundred hours of cleaning into this building? Show it. Show it. You have a sponge. You have white cloth. Sometimes with the white cloth, put alcohol on it. Right? Get get a a surfactant sorry. Not an alcohol to to debond the grease from the wall. So it it picks it up and attracts it to the the fabric. That’s what you want. So that’s how you can apply these tests to your your real world. Alright, guys. We’re gonna jump into a question period. I thought we had one earlier, but I guess I forgot to put the slide in earlier. Yeah. We’ll jump into q and a. And and, Kristen, what do you what do you got for us? I got a ton. That’s that’s why you should put a question period in before. Okay. So, how do you convince adjusters that hygienist reports are necessary for fire and smoke projects? So two things. Why are you ordering a hygienist report on a on a fire? Generally, as a rule, you’re worried about the contaminant. Something burned in the house, like house fires. So the argument that you’ll find from adjusters is firefighters don’t get tests on houses. The reason why firefighters don’t get tests on houses, they assume it’s a hazardous environment and successful chemicals and other things. They don’t test every house. They test chemical factories. They test smoke down range because that will impact a larger public. But a firefighter assumes that the house has high degrees of chemical contamination. As restorers, you would justify a hygienist not from the standard. So the fire standard or the s five hundred will say, hey. You should take us a a test to determine how to clean. A fire justification for cleaning is health and safety. We need to know what we’re dealing with in order to do a proper risk assessment. Most restorers don’t do a proper risk assessment for safety at the beginning because if you did, you would say we have a contaminant of smoke and odor, and it’s unknown what the origin of it is or it’s unknown what’s in that smoke and and fire. We should have a hygienist do a test. Now am I a big fan of hygienists on tests? No. Where you don’t have to if you’re gonna do a full clean, but there’s a good argument to have a hygienist on a test. I would just assume that we’re gonna go in. Now here’s why I I would make the counterargument. So I’ll give you both arguments because I I I could go either way on this one. You could put a an a hygienist on a job at the beginning to test what contaminant was there when you got there. And then after you’re done all your cleaning processes, you could put a hygienist on the job to determine how clean you got it. We don’t know what contaminants were there before the fire, but we do know what was there when you started, and, hopefully, you have a diminished severity level when you’re done your cleaning, and that’s that will tell a story. There’s another argument from restorers that would say, we don’t need a hygienist. We know there’s a contaminant there. Our job is to clean. So if you do a thorough detailed cleaning, then when you’re done cleaning, you have an odor. If that odor is gone because of cleaning, then you got it. If it’s still remaining there, you’re gonna apply your odor control techniques and make the odor go away. The problem with testing is that the testing isn’t necessarily conclusive. It’s just a it’s a mean. So your your olfactory sense is not necessarily mine, but olfactory sense is your sense of smell is gonna be I think it’s ten times or a hundred times more effective than a chemical test for a VOC test. Your nose will have more sensitivity than a test we do. So if you don’t smell smoke, chances are that VOC test won’t show anything that’s smoke related. Now there might be other chemicals that have no odors. So that would be the argument that because we can’t smell all the chemicals, maybe that’s when we would do a test. And I’m the standard leans a little bit further away from testing based on the disputes I go to. Now those are the worst of the worst. I lean a little bit more into testing. But either argument you could make is that as a general rule, we restore, we clean, we remove byproducts of fire, and we leave the homes in in a mostly sanitary condition. You could make the argument that you should do a test at the beginning of every fire so you know what is there. You know how to protect yourself. And I think that’s your biggest argument is that there was some stuff that required I’ll give you so I’ll give you the actual argument for the testing. A house that we had done that was oxidized, so not fire related, but you could easily get the same chemicals fire related. The oxidization processes caused us caused a a chemical to be formed, and the chemical was chlorine chloride methylene. I believe it was chloride methylene. It’s got a zero PEL. So you there’s no permissible exposure limit. In that structure, there was a six parts per billion exposure. The proper way to enter that home would have been with an SCBA. Give you the perspective, this house never had that chemical six years ago. When we when when this this file was going to court, they did a test, and the test had this chemical come up. When this chemical was discovered, I went, there’s no PEL on that. There’s no permissible exposure limit. Literally, for the homeowners to go home, they would have to go home in a scuba suit. SCBA, full tire rep. That’s crazy. Never I never suspected that was gonna happen, but that was could you find that in a fire? Yeah. And East Palestine, the East Palestine fire would show you that those bad chemicals, what were they? They were the, it was a polymer, chemical. It was, like, twenty five thousand gallons. I forget the exact chemical. But it’s a causing, chemical. That could be in a a structure as well. We have things under your your sink that could get when they burn, they’re gonna cause chlorine to be released and other nasty chemicals. We’re probably in a has more hazardous environment more often. There’s an argument that when it cools, it’s it’s safer. Show me the test results that show that, and then I’ll believe you. I think we from a safety perspective, I would argue it is that it’s a it’s a worker safety issue, and we’re gonna test so we can PPE upright. And that would be your your most your strongest argument. Your second strongest argument would be then I need to know what chemicals to use to clean it if it can be cleaned, or do I have to remove the material? That’d be your next strongest argument. Good question. So I think at the beginning, you had mentioned a a fire loss that you were on. So a question came in that said on that particular fire loss, if the adjuster had not inspected the roof, why were you the only party responsible financially? I’m trying to think of the so I’m I’m I’m you if you’re the only one that didn’t try to think of the the context of the question to to the the event. Could you repeat the question? Yeah. So it said on that particular fire loss, if the adjuster had not inspected the roof, why were you the only party responsible financially? So so you’re the expert. So if a if a adjuster goes in now I’m I’m I’m gonna maybe butcher this because I’m I’m not pulling the exact correlation here. So I’m gonna I’ve got one, and the reason why is I got a slide where I got some fire damage. Ask me in the come back to this question. I think I’m talking about the job in the future that I that I I’ll show you. Come back with this question and stop me in the middle of that discussion if that person’s question is being answered. I wanna make sure I get I I’m seeing that it’s about the senior home. Oh, so why why would why was it the contract? Because we’re responsible. Like, the adjuster’s not gonna do an inspection on it. We went in and did all of our shitty processes on it. We were like, oh, we’ll make the smell go away. We’ll just deal with the odor. We didn’t clean it. We didn’t remove the materials that were affected. It was in the insulation paneling. So it was it was trapped in between the layers, and we just were like, you know what’s cheaper? Let’s not take the roof off. Let’s go seal it in, and let’s do a bunch of stuff. No. We we made decisions. The reason we were responsible is we made decisions that the insurance company is writing checks for, and we didn’t give them options. If we would have said, hey. There’s an option to so it’s communication failure. Okay. So going to that one, we went in and said, you know what we can do? Is we can seal the odor into the roof. That wasn’t necessarily the right option, but we we gave it to them, and and and we may not have even given it to them. Actually, I I think what we just did is said, hey. That order is not a problem. We’ll just seal the roof. Had we said you can tear off the roof and deal with it properly, or we can attempt to seal it and make the odor go away, And you may have to deal with an engineer to say, hey. Are those trapped contaminants gonna cause a problem? Is it gonna corrode fasteners faster than than expected? Let the engineer sign off on it. In that case, we just did the work. And when the smoke smell returned, it’s trapped in there. We’re holding the bag because we had given them a like, probably, like, an eight hundred thousand dollar invoice to do that type of work. We didn’t tell them that there was another option. So it it it’s it’s that I didn’t give you enough information on the on the situation of why we were holding back. Thank you. Chris. So another question came in that says we tend to get a lot of kickback on the fire mitigation portion of a claim. For example, they always fight us on the HEPA vac, and dry soot removal, ice blasting, framing, encapsulation. Any thoughts on this? Is there a standard fire mitigation process for soot removal? So it’s removing the contaminant. Again, when we communicate the contaminant removal, our goal is to remove the contaminant. Our goal is not to seal the contaminant into the wall. The one, the product isn’t rated for it. So so the way we were sold smoke sealers, if you read the label, it says it needs to be applied to a clean, dry surface. If it’s got smoke contaminant, it’s not it’s not clean. Why? Because they’re not the product doesn’t work on smoke contaminant. It doesn’t work on smoke particles. It’s sealing the wall for anything that you couldn’t get, not the stuff you should’ve got. We see that all the time. I see adjusters. They’re like, hey. It’s it’s there there’s visible smoke, like hand smears or where people were, like, walking, checking the wall. There’s visible smears. And they’re like, yeah. Just seal it in. No. That’s not how the product is designed. It requires a clean surface. So you go back to the communication of when we come in, we’re removing the contaminant. If the contaminant is on framing, we can sand or we can blast. That’s how we’re gonna remove the contaminant. If you say no, don’t do it, I go to the homeowner and say it it’s it’s really don’t get into the confrontation. At the beginning, you tell the homeowner and the adjuster, the goal is we’re removing the contaminants from the fire here. We’re removing the things that shouldn’t be here because of the fire. Do we agree? Yes. Once we agree, when we get in that discussion about framing, are we ice blasting or sanding? Because we are removing those contaminants. That that is our job. If they come back and say, hey. Don’t clean it. Just smoke seal it. I can’t. The product label says that’s not how it is, and it could bleed through. Could it bleed through? Depends. Did you put enough on? Should you be trapping a contaminant up against the wall? Are you actually cleaning it, or are you just leaving it? Would that be like that would be like taking a a cat three sewer backup and just spraying a sealant over it and saying leave the cat three behind. The reason why is our fire standard hasn’t caught up. So the first version is gonna be a some a helper to get us to where the water standards are now. It’s got a few revisions to get there. But, yeah, that’s that’s where your pushback’s coming from is is just poor communication. Not not even poor communication. It’s just not setting the expectation of what needs to happen on the job. Most restores and fire, it’s been by feel. Yep. I think this is good. No. It’s a process. You’re gonna go in. You’re gonna remove the materials. Is this heat damage, smoke damage? And you walk through it. It’s just the the longer answer is there’s, like, there’s there’s how did you set up the job communication? What are your processes that you’re gonna deploy? And then how do you communicate all that? There’s, like, a whole bunch that goes with it. The short answer is is you have to set the expectation. The long answer is there’s, like, a whole way that you get there, but, yeah, we don’t have time for that. Thanks, Chris. So, we did have a question come in about, protein fires, actually. And they’re wondering if warming the surface would help with the clean. It might. You know what? So so it’s that’s interesting. Is is it it actually, that makes a lot of sense. Well, if you were to look at it like fat, if you were barbecuing and you pull it off, it stays wet. Like, it stays in a liquid form for quite a while. Even when it’s cool, it still stays in a liquid form, but next day, it’s hardened up. Heating it up might make your effort easier. Actually, I I like that idea. I I I’d have to give that a try. It would make sense to me that it would make it easier to clean if it was hotter. Now what temperature do you gotta get it to to soften it up? Is it ninety Fahrenheit? And then you’ve got a working heat condition, but but I still like the idea. I like like, some of it might be chemicals. Could you get, like, a you’re just using a degreaser. And with the degreaser do work, it it just might take a few more, you know, a few more passes to get the degreaser to do its its job. Kinda like if you were if if you wanna look at it, put in a barbecue burn some meat in a barbecue. Put put a piece of metal in a barbecue like a butter knife, and then burn burn your meat. Like, just let her cook. And that that barbecue experiment would let you know how to play with it because that’s effectively what you’re doing in a barbecue is you’re creating a protein smoke. And if you do it right, you you’ll get the same result. So how easy is it to clean metal tongs that have been exposed to the heat and and the barbecue? It’s harder. It’s harder when it’s cold. It’s easier when it’s warm, so you use warm water or hot water. You might be using insulated gloves instead. Actually, go into your heat. Use almost like a boiling water, and then use a insulated rubber glove would probably be your best way of getting the best chemical action because your cleaner is gonna be superheated. Your skins are protected, and then your cloths are heated for that, you know, thirty seconds. Probably a better way. I like it. I’d like to, yeah, play with it. Let me know for sure. Yeah. Great question. There was a question actually that was entered into the chat, and there was a few people interested in it. So I wanna make sure I ask it. So it says, I have a question about tear gas. Does this fall into the fire and restoration? I have a recent claim, and this is a new one for me. If anyone has experience with it, clean with cleaning and writing off content. Yeah. So tear gas is, there so so tear gas is a dry powder. And so you you would handle that similar to if you were doing, like, drug lab cleanups, it would be similar to dealing with the powdery substances. So you can vacuum it. You’re gonna be in full PPE, probably a PAPR. You don’t want any of that getting in because you are gonna have a rough day if it does. So you’re gonna wanna have a higher level of protection on your on your your workers. We’ve done a few of those. We’re gonna do a dry cleanup in porous materials, carpet. Yeah, you’re gonna throw that out. Kind of it’s one of those ones because it’s such an irritant. You’re when in doubt, throw it out. It’s gonna be applied. When you deal with, like, OC spray or or, like, pepper spray, you’re dealing with, like, greasy liquid, but but tear gas is a is a is a powder. I did I haven’t done a ton of them. I’ve done a couple of the SWAT entries when I was in Vancouver. We had some houses that were owned by by gangs that we we restored, and, and we had to do some some when when the doors were were knocked in and and the gas was sprayed, or burst into there. You you would you would do it that way. It’s just a it’s a clean process. Go in, scope your loss. That shit’s everywhere, by the way. Like, when it goes, it’s everywhere. So, like, every porous surface is probably a vacuum, and then you might be just tossing stuff. When in doubt, I I’d say throw it out with with that. Oh, and I saw I just saw someone put that there’s oil based. So water activates it. Cleaning is impossible. Yeah. If if you got oil based on fabrics, chuck it out. Oil based on solid surfaces, you can clean it. You just use a degreaser on it and and go hard on on the cleaning on solid surfaces. But porous stuff is just like, why why you don’t bring it to your shop. Why would you do that? So it’s it’s throw it out. Just economically nonrestorable. Awesome. So how do you know when clean is not sufficient for smoke damage and the material must be removed? So porous materials such as wood, drywall, flooring, etcetera. Yeah. So if you do the process right and and we’ll get into the odor control. When you do the process right, your olfactory senses so, like, I’m not the best. My sense of smell is not very good, and it’s desensitized to this. But as a general rule, females have a better olfactory sense. And then if they’re pregnant or they’ve got a highly sensitized individual that can has a, like, super sense of smell, you will find that they will smell things that I can’t smell. And that’s fine. That’s it’s it’s subjective. So someone comes in, like a homeowner comes in and they say, hey. I smell smoke, and you’re like, I don’t. Okay. Where do you smell smoke? Let’s let’s use their nose to trace it because there is people with with a higher sense of of smell than than others. We used to say it was psychological. There there’s we there’s more testing out there that says there’s more people sensitized to chemicals now that there’s it’s probably not true. Like, psychological smoke is probably the exception. So I I’m I’m probably trailed off. I probably didn’t answer the question at all. How do you know when it when it’s clean? It’s it’s olfactory, and then it’s did you clean? Like, did you clean every inch of this wall? What what’s interesting is you can’t see my ceiling, but it’s it’s it’s a it’s a texture. There’s jobs when we go in where you see the textures, unpainted texture, and the texture hasn’t been touched. And so they’re like, we cleaned everything. Well, you didn’t clean the ceiling. Oh, no. We wet cleaned everything. You definitely didn’t clean the ceiling. Like, the texture would peel off. It would absorb water. So what do you do there? You scrape and retexture the ceiling. So some of it you can clean, some of it you can’t. We just sometimes go in with, like, superhero mentality saying we can clean everything. You need to test clean stuff. And and so part of it is just you have to do a thorough cleaning. A lot of times, it’s just incomplete cleaning that leads it to us. But I go back to those tests. After you’ve done your cleaning, you did a pretest of what contaminated look like, and you did a posttest of what you’re left with. And if you have any odors, track them down. Is it the carpet? Is it under a baseboard? How deep do you go? Depends on the pressure. Is it in hardwoods? Was it a hot fire where we had velocity and thermal dynamics at play, or was it cold fire, like protein fire where the smoke’s just gonna settle onto the items? It’s not gonna penetrate super deep into it. It it it really depends on the type of fire you have. Good question, but, like, there’s a there’s a lot to that one to unpack. What words should we use instead of pre loss? I I would go to an acceptable condition. So an acceptable condition, is gonna vary. If the drywall is heat damaged, the pre loss condition is you had drywall. We’re gonna put drywall back. But the acceptable condition is new drywall. So the insurance company would say, well, what was the pre loss? Well, they had drywall. Okay. So the from an insurance policy, the thing was pre loss. It’s it’s a drywall painted walls pre loss. For you, the acceptable condition is not fire damaged drywall that we paint over or heat damaged drywall we paint over. It’s new drywall with paint. Right? So I would turn my terminology to the acceptable condition, and then you could say the acceptable and agreed condition. And the acceptable condition is drywall that’s been exposed to high heat needs to be replaced, and so we’re replacing it with new. That’s acceptable. And that’s acceptable to the adjuster, and that’s acceptable to the homeowner. If it’s not acceptable to one of them, the homeowner is the one that’s gonna sign your your promise to pay, and the adjuster’s either gonna reimburse the homeowner or they’re not. We get wrapped up in what does the adjuster think. I don’t really care what the adjuster thinks. If I’m dealing with a homeowner that can afford to pay it, a millionaire let let’s let’s take money out of it and just say, money doesn’t matter. The the the homeowner has more than enough money. What do you want me to do in your home? So you as a homeowner could pay my bill. It doesn’t matter what my bill is. The adjuster wants to leave all the damaged heat damaged drywall in the house, but what do you want me to do? Take it out and put good stuff back in. Okay. That’s what we’ll do. That’s how you gotta look at your jobs, and then it’s for the the insured and the adjuster to to figure out who’s paying. But your job is to say, I can’t leave damaged drywall. Heat damaged drywall is not the same as it was originally, so I would use the accepted and agreed condition. Because we could we could agree that your mural was heat damaged. We could also agree that we could only clean it to a certain degree, and we could leave it in place. That would be the acceptable condition that we’ve agreed to. Does that make sense? It’s it’s it gives you more control if you use that terminology. Like, you literally as a restorer are now in control of heat damage drywall is not acceptable. It’s not safe. It’s it it’s not the way it is. It warrants a replacement. Who’s agreeing to it? And and that’s how you would position it. So you take pre loss completely out of your terminology and be like, it drywall, and we’re putting drywall back in. Or it was hardwood, and we’re putting in carpet. K? What’s better? Is it a betterment or is it a a lesser degree replacement? It’s worth less. Okay. The insurance company should sign off on that. A betterment, the homeowner will sign off on the difference. It’s it’s you’re a contractor for all like, if they have a small water damage, you’ll bulldoze their home if they want you to. That’s what a contractor does. We just are tied in really close to the insurance company so you have that conversation. Yeah. Great answer. That’s how I would approach it. Do we have time for one more question? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I found this one kind of interesting. So they said we had a job where the painter said the sponge test was not acceptable and needed a yellow white test, which they couldn’t really decipher what the yellow white test was. Yeah. So Chris? So my guess is is somebody has a little bit of knowledge enough to be dangerous. Not really. No. The the only one like, I’ve never heard of a yellow wipe test. I heard a white cloth test. One of the wipes that you could use is you could use, like, a baby wipe or Joe Myers was saying, I think it was Rhino Wipes. It was, like, maybe the industrial man’s version of of a baby wipe. But you could use a a wipe that has a surfactant in it, and they’re wetted, and you could do a wipe that way. But the sponge the sponge test is a good test. It’s it’s it’s a electrostatic charge that goes across the surface and picks up contaminants are on the wall. All it is is an indicator. That’s all it is. So it doesn’t matter if it’s sure. You want me to use white instead of a sponge? Cool. Does it is it white? Is it dry? The whole thing that you do when you do a test is the same sample size. So on a wipe test, it’d be about a one foot by one foot square. And as long as you do a one foot by one foot, you’re gonna get a pretty good indicator. What what happens is you’ll get adjusters. Let’s say that this was their their cloth, and they’ll do this. Yep. Nothing’s there. Okay. I could take the same cloth and go well, look. Something’s there. You just set the standard, and your standard is one foot by one foot. And that’s the standard you’re gonna use. Now on a protein fire or a really light fire, maybe you would bump that up. Maybe you would do a two foot by two foot because your think of your test size as the sensitivity level of your test. If you increase the surface area, you increase the sensitivity of your test. So in a in a moderate to heavy fire, one foot by one foot is acceptable. In a really light fire, maybe you’re doing two foot by two foot because you’re trying to determine a more a more sensitive area. You’re gonna need a bigger catch size on your test. That makes sense. Now as I saw one one comment that the the IICRC says if it can’t be cleaned, then it has to be removed. That’s not necessarily true. It’s true from a from a okay. It’s true from a standard side is that if it can’t be cleaned, then you you you basically say you could replace it. That’s kinda true on a porous material. That if if if odors have got in there and you can’t clean it, then then it has to be removed. But if it’s stained and so there’s no odors. It’s just stained. It’s it’s visually not appealing. It may not have to be replaced. Like, that’s an insurance function. You’ve cleaned it, but it’s it’s stained. Let’s say that that that smoking has stained the paint. You clean the smoke residue off the wall, but there’s a there’s a stain to it. It’s clean, but it just doesn’t appear nice. That’s an insurance discussion. If it’s a private job and the homeowner says get rid of the smoke smell, you wipe it. If it’s permeated into the paint, you might have to seal it. If it’s not, it just looks bad, but it’s it’s the contaminant is gone. It’s kinda it just the way of looking at it, it’s it’s not that hard and fast. Like, the IICRC says this. It says that. It’s not that hard and fast. You’re dealing with people and people’s property. As a general rule, if you can’t clean it and it’s contaminated, you’re removing the contaminant. So you might remove contaminated drywall. That’s the professional restorer’s way of doing it. If the homeowner says leave it, then you’re now saying you’ve accepted a lesser condition and probably some waivers are being signed and and but it’s it’s not that hard and fast. It’s it’s a good rule to have for technicians, but it’s not that hard and fast because it is depending on what if I’m the homeowner and I say, absolutely not you’re doing that, guess what? You’re not doing it. Same thing with throwing things out, people. When we throw people stuff out, like, hey. That’s fire damaged in it. I’ve gotta dispose of it. No. You do not. That is their stuff. If you throw away the kid’s first toy that, you know, grandma and grandpa gave them, but grandma and grandpa passed away. And you don’t you say, no. I can’t give this back to you. That’s not your job. Your job is to say, I can’t give it back to you in a sanitary condition. I can give it back to you. You can keep it in whatever state you want. It’s just not sanitary. You don’t have the authority to throw people’s stuff out. Like, that’s not your job. So just be very careful on taking a class and and applying it to to real world. Real world is they they own the stuff. I just called you in to see if you could clean it. And if you can’t clean it, give me my stuff back. If I claim the insurance company for replacement, the insurance company will say, hey. You’ve gotta get rid of it before I give you a new one. But those are all just discussions and agreements. They’re not hard rules. Does that make sense? Like, we we don’t live in that in the real world in in a textbook classroom, we live in that world. In the real world, you do what what they what the customer wants, and you you just have a discussion around it. Alright. Let’s let’s go on here, guys. We’re gonna jump into the next one. How confident are you in the quality of your detailed preliminary report? So in here, it’s very confident. We rarely get pushed back. Somewhat confident. We sometimes argue over scope. Not confident. All our fires seem unique. We struggle at getting out good reports, and I’d rather not comment we’re learning. And that’s fair, guys. Any of those ones are are fair. Again, you answer. No one’s gonna see your your responses, so you guys can be free to answer at will. I’m seeing somewhat confident, not confident. Some some I’d rather not say is. And and here’s the thing. I I’m gonna say it used to be said that water damage was was a science and and fire damage is an art. I I I’m gonna say that that that terminology is probably changing as we go forward here in the next five or ten years. I think you’re gonna see fire damage is gonna become more of a science as well. It just the fire departments and the fire industry firefighting industry has started to put a bigger push on it, and I think you’re gonna see that it’s gonna come into our industry probably in the next five or ten years as, as some ways of thinking take place. Alright. Let’s let’s give everyone a chance to answer that, and then let’s let’s let’s end that. Alright. So we got a lot of very confident. We rarely get pushbacks. That’s good. The seventeen percent of you that are are sending in good reports or are doing a a big documentation. Somewhat confident. We sometimes argue over scope, and that’s normal. It can become less normal if you’re starting to talk about what your goal is. So our goal is to remove heat damaged material and remove the contaminants of a fire. Our goal is to dispose of porous materials and try to assess semiporous materials and clean nonporous materials. If you start talking, changing your language, and setting real goals, the homeowner is on board with you right from the start. Hey. All that stuff, like the the the mattresses, the pillows, we’re not gonna try restoring those. Those are gonna go for replacement. We could try restoring them, but we can’t get into the fabric if that fire was that intense. Intense. Plus you breathe and and and live around there, so any cleaning chemicals we put on your mattress, you’re gonna be breathing in for eight hours a day. Just better for us to replace that. If it was something light, you might say, hey. We could do a HEPA vac in and the light clean. And and if you’re good with that, we’ll keep your mattress. All of those things are part of the reporting process. Eight percent, we’re not confident, and five that said we struggle with getting good reports out. What’s interesting is what is a good report? So are you helping the adjuster make the coverage decisions? And so we’re gonna talk about that in this section because this section is important that you understand where this goes. So when we look at field documentation, we talked at length about using pre loss, but field documentation is great because you’re showing the job before you put any tools in. If you’ve sat through any of the water damage trainings that I did, with 吃瓜不打烊, we basically set went through and said, hey. Before you put any tools on-site, before you do anything, take preexisting photos and make sure your field documentation is tight. What you’re doing is you’re setting the tone for what you had to deal with when you went in. Now it might not seem that important when you’re trying to get paid or in a normal claims process. It gets exacerbated when you get to a legal process, and now you have lawyers and judges eyeing your work and saying, well, hold on. You’re saying that that there was all these concerns, but your report says nothing. And so that’s how claims managers or claims VPs look at your files, and that’s how they determine whether you’re getting full pay, partial pay, or are they referring you to their legal department because they think you defrauded them. Normally, restorers are trying to do the right thing. So let’s just say that the vast majority of us are trying to do the right thing, we’re helping people at their time and need. How did you document the job, and how did you communicate that? And you assume because we know what we’re doing in fires that the adjuster knows what they’re dealing with when we send the paperwork in. Don’t make that assumption. Just because they do a hundred claims a year, you don’t know if they were doing a hundred or two hundred or a thousand claims that were auto. And now all of a sudden, they’re sitting in a fire desk, and they’re getting fire losses, they’ve never seen one. Like, don’t assume that they know anything. Assume that they know nothing. Because if your report writes to someone who knows nothing, if you ever go to court, to a judge, to a lawyer, to, an umpire, an appraiser, they’re gonna read your report like you knew nothing with so much detail that you answer all the questions. So what questions do we answer? What were the overview photos like when you got there? What were the preexisting conditions? What was there when you got there? How was the shape of the home? The two terms that we didn’t spend time on, but cause of loss, source of loss. Cause of loss is an insurance term. Source of loss is a restoration term. In fire, the cause of loss was a bird’s nest in an exhaust vent. The source of loss was a puff back from a furnace. The source of loss was plastic synthetics that burned. A TV burned, you know, electrical fire and wires burned, wires, drywall, and the entire main floor burned, that’s gonna be your source of loss is what are we dealing with. So don’t get stuck on cause of loss. Cause of loss determines if there’s coverage. Source of loss determines how we restore the building. So I’m gonna focus on the sources like, hey. There was chemicals in the sink that where the fire took place, or the kitchen burned, and we have a lot of plastics. That I would consider as part of our source of loss or the resulting damage that was was was burnt during the fire. Then we have evidence of byproducts of combustion. So I’m gonna document where the smoke soot has gone. Where would I find that? Well, I could find it in attic hutches or attic openings. Why? Usually, it’s hot or cold, and there’s a temperature differential. In the winter, if you have a fire in the winter, the absolutely first place I’m gonna go do a check is the attic opening because it’s cold air above, and we’ve got hot air going to a cold surface. And normally, it’s not really sealed. So you’re gonna find a ton of contaminants that form around the attic openings. You’re gonna find a lot of contaminants around the windows, around doors. Wherever it’s cold, you’ll find some some evidence of of byproducts. When you come in and and we watched an adjuster, I was on-site with an adjuster. We’re in a room, and a window is right there. And the adjuster goes to the inside warm wall and does a wipe. And I’m like, hey. Why don’t you why don’t you test that window right there? No. No. I got this this wall. I’m like, no. We should test the window. And the window was absolutely covered because it’s a cold surface, and that’s where the smoke residue is gonna go. It’s gonna bond to the colder surfaces. Was there any on the wall? Yeah. But not as much as on the window. So that room went from questionable to absolutely covered. These are some photos of a of a house that that burned. I wanna draw your attention to a couple areas here. On the exterior, you’ve got this metal roof. You’ve got some some smoke that’s come out of a window here. Right? What else do we see here? Right? So you’ve got an exterior that looks pretty good. You have no physical damage. You have no discoloration on the on the roof metal, a little bit out the window, so you’ve got siding. Now what where potentially is this gonna tell me that I need to look? If I’ve got fire damage or smoke signs of smoke here and heat, am I potentially have soot trapped in behind the vinyl siding on the exterior? Do I need to deal with the exterior contaminants? Yep. If I’ve got particulate trapped in the wall, I’m gonna check this wall to see if we have to clean behind here. Why? There’s a source of odor that’s down inside this wall. Up here, we’ve got where it looks like water has run down. Do I potentially have a particulate that’s in between the vinyl and the wall? Yes. So we’re gonna investigate that. I’ve also got some some soffit damage in here as well, probably from the firefighters checking for it, maybe from the heat. Inside, you have overview photos. So when you do your overview photos, typically, you enter the door and you go left to right. Click, click, click, click, click around, and then I would take a step across, and I would photo this. I want three hundred and sixty degree photos. You’re gonna deploy three sixty technology into your your fire losses. It’s gonna tell an entire story. I want the resulting damage. I wanna show that the fire caused all this damage. Why am I replacing the wood in here? Why am I throwing out contents? Why am I dealing with the floor? Why am I going down like, why is my scope the way it is? And you should have an answer for every why. Why are we replacing the floor? Because there was fire contaminated water underneath. Cool. That’s a good reason. Why are you cleaning the floor with with ice blasting? Because there was particulate that was there. Okay. And it didn’t clean with a HEPA vac. Okay. Justify it. Hey. We were we were ice blasting it anyway, and it was a light ice blast to get the sheathing clean. K? Just go through and justify your cleaning process. We could sand or we can blast. If we sand, it’s gonna take longer. If we blast, we’re in and out. This was the cause of loss. Now in here, the cause of the loss was a a a paper basket with some kindling. Notice which way the door opened. So when they opened the door, the spark from the fireplace went into the kindling basket, lit the kindling basket up. These walls had just been given five coats of of of clear coat, and they went up like gasoline. The homeowner was home. He was actually sitting on the couch, and he said, Chris, this thing went up, like like, literally, it was on gas. He goes, I ran to the kitchen to get a pot that was cooking macaroni, and I came back in, and my entire living room was an inferno. And he got out, and he had smoke inhalation because he tried to fight the fire with this pot of water. He’s like, I just gave up. I had to run out of the house. His causal loss was a spark that landed in there. What was the source? Well, the source was everything. Like, we’re cleaning everything that burned. We have a source that’s this synthetic material. So I’ve got synthetics that I’m dealing with. So it’s not necessarily gonna be written as, like, the source was a fire basket. That’s a cause. My source is what is I what am I cleaning? I’m cleaning synthetics. I’m cleaning natural materials. I’m cleaning fuels and oils and other things. In there is where it burned. That’s the source of loss. If we’re sitting there going, is it the source? Am I gonna say, well, you know how you like with water? You go, oh, the source is a a clean water tap, or it’s a supply line. Okay. Did it sit for five days? Because now your source is a category three. Here, your source is what? A wastebasket? No. It’s everything that burned. So you’re gonna identify the different things that burn there. Insulation, wood, you know, stains, a whole bunch of chemicals in there that that burned. What about the kitchen? You have plastics that were on the kitchen surface, stained wood. All these plastics burned. You got a lot of soupy stuff in there. Like, this is a chemical soup. We walk into it thinking like, oh, it’s just wood that burned. No. It’s everything that burned in there. So now how are you gonna treat it? Does this wage the the conversation? Should we have a hygienist come in and test? Maybe. We’re gonna remove a lot of the solid contaminants. We’re gonna get to the floor. We’re gonna take the flooring out. We’re gonna bring this thing down to a stud, and we’re gonna ice blast a HEPA vac. You could make the argument we should do a test before, do a test after we’re done. I’d be okay with that argument. I think it’s a good argument from a a legal perspective. There’s a liability to that that if you didn’t clean properly, your your test results are gonna show it, but it just means you have more cleaning to do. So you just don’t set yourself up for like, hey. When I say it’s clean, it’s clean. It’s like, we’ll clean, we’ll test, and then we’ll determine if we need to clean more. I think that’s reasonable. Is that where you wanna do it? It’s it’s it’s right now, it’s not written in the standard, so you have preference. But here’s all the things that you could come in and document. Overview photos, preexisting conditions, this cause and source of loss. The source, would document all the things that burned or or could have burned. So plastics, chemicals, I’m gonna document all that. That’s what I’m trying to clean up. Resulting damage to structure, so cabinets, drywall flooring, trim, insulation, electrical, we’re gonna like, that’s the damage we’re gonna document. Resulting damage to contents. Heat damage to contents. You ever seen carpet when it got heat damaged but not, like, not fire damage, but it’s crusty on the top? That’s heat damage. K? Well, we’re gonna replace that. If you’re putting air filtration devices in, why are you putting AFDs into a building, or why would you put a building under negative pressure? Primary thing would be particle count. I’m trying to make it safe for workers, and I can put a an engineering control in, which is an AFD, and I can reduce the particle count. You guys are any of you guys using particle counters right now on your fire jobs? You guys know particle counters? Let me go get one. You’re gonna wanna take a look at this. So if you’re if you’re in doing fires, you actually, if you’re using AFDs on water damage or otherwise, you should consider getting a particle counter. So a particle counter will allow you to figure out the particulate level that’s inside a building after a fire. You can take the particle counter just like you would a thermal hygrometer and put it at the back of your air scrubber and see what how the air is coming through. Now it should be coming through ninety nine point nine seven percent clean, right, or because you’re going through the HEPA filter. But when you look at it and you and you’re running it through, if you have a high particulate count in the building and then on the end of the scrubber, it’s been dramatically reduced, you document that. What is the air scrubber doing on a job site? Hey. You don’t need air scrubbers. How many times have you heard that? You don’t need that equipment there. From a site safety perspective, you sure as shit do need it there. And the reason why is we’re taking care of a a contaminant. We’ve got respiratory condition or respiratory hazard, and the engineering control we’re placing in is a is a HEPA air filtration device. And we’re gonna put enough of them in to reduce our level, and you should determine what the level is. Are you reducing it from thirteen thousand to five hundred? Are you reducing it from a hundred thousand particulate count down to to two thousand? Even if you show that you reduced it from a high severity to a lower severity, you justified your AFD. If I reviewed your file and I saw that you actually tested rather than just say, I’m putting it in, okay. And what did you how did it look tomorrow? Oh, I tested it again like I did a dehumidifier. You now have justified your AFDs. If there’s a firefighter that’s, a firefighting activity in there and they put water in, is there humidity control? Did you stabilize the job? One of the questions came in. If I remember correctly, someone asked the question, how do you deal with mold on a fire loss when mold’s not covered? Okay. There’s a few things. If you’re doing a fire clean and you have the humidity level there, are you cleaning mold or are you cleaning a fire contaminant? So if you say I’m doing a mold remediation, you’re probably not there. But if you’re removing the fire contaminants that have mold, you’re literally just doing a fire clean. But if that’s the concern and the homeowner your discussion with the homeowner in your area is, hey. Insurance companies don’t pay for mold. We should stabilize the the job until a decision is made on how we’re gonna proceed. Where that doesn’t apply is when there’s a fire investigation going on. You probably can’t set up anything in the building, but you could ask the fire chief or the fire investigator, hey. Could we take the humidity levels down and put in or pull out dry air into the environment? Would that impact your investigation if we did that? Sometimes they’re gonna say, hey. You know what? We got the information we need. We just wanna spend more time on-site. No. You could dehumidify the the air. You just have to talk to them and communicate. They might let you. And if the homeowner agrees to it or a homeowner requests you to do it, you’re now doing humidity control, stabilization in a contaminated environment. All of that’s justified. But the AFDs, there’s your justification. Show show some science. Tell them where you’re at. Tell them what you’re trying to do, and tell them that what your goal of getting it to. We’re at thirteen thousand. We’re putting in this many AFDs because we’ve sized the the job for six or seven or eight air changes per hour. And then we’re gonna reduce eight air changes to per hour to four once we get it to where we wanna be. And we’re looking to be under two thousand particles on the counter on the three micron, whatever your your goal is. Cool. That’s what you’re doing. That is your engineering control. That is an OSHA backed respiratory hazard elimination. I think you’re probably pretty good. That’s justified. Saying you need AFDs just for the sake of saying AFDs, nope. Very hard to justify. Evidence of byproducts of combustion, we talked about that. There’s your different samples. The other one, move furniture and and then pull fur furnace filters. Pull a furnace filter, put it into a bag, keep it. That is your justification that the ventilation system has been impacted by whatever the loss was. If that if that filter needs to go out for testing, you have it. Just keep track of the stuff you’re doing. Building code authority. So I’ll tell you that I actually work with building codes. We’ll just call, like, a building inspector in and say, hey. We’re dealing with this issue. What do you think we should do on the rebuild? Or or pay our electrical with compromise with some water. What’s your thoughts? I’m not the expert. They’re the ones gonna pass this. But if I call them in to inspect my job while I’m there, guess who I’m not like, they’re not coming after me. We’re working with them. So their their goal is to help me get the building back to condition. I call building code inspectors to the job site and say, hey. Give me a hand. What do you think we should do here? I think we should replace it. Yeah. You’re gonna replace it. Oh, guess what? An authority having jurisdiction that just said we’re replacing it. No longer my opinion. So work with the professionals that you’re working with. Now I’m looking for safety. If they say it’s safe to leave, cool. Sign off and tell us not to replace it. We’re good. I’m not making decisions. That’s the goal is to not make decisions. Engineers. If an engineer says they’re doing something, have them sign off on it. So if they say that you can do a engineered trust repair, okay, but then they have to sign off on that repair. You should be getting them to to put that information in writing. Typically, they’re gonna write a report. If the report says you need to do a b c d, you do a b c d exactly as you’re told. Their stamp takes the liability of that repair, and then they should be coming to inspect it after. Just make sure you’re not the one making the call, like, on trusses or floor joists. Those are engineered systems. It’s not your job to say, yes. I think you can support the weight of the house. Let the engineer do it. OSHA, how many of you I’m looking at the chat right now. How many of you have called OSHA on yourselves? Show of hands. Anyone call OSHA on themselves? I use this tactic on a job when the adjuster told us we were doing something that we had to work in a crawl space. It was a two foot crawl space, and they wanted us to belly crawl in, belly crawl out, and and to do all the restoration work underneath. I said, no. We’ll we’ll take the floor up or we can lift the building. And we got punted from the job. But before we got punted from the job, I called our Oh and S and asked them if they could come out and tell us how to properly do it. And I said, here’s my two work scopes. Which one would you choose? And they said, well, I think the floor coming out was probably the better way. And I said, I agree. Well, when that when we got punted from the job, the homeowner was surprised. When OHNS came back to the contractor, it was belly crawling in the in the building. They got a visit from our OHS. They got punted from the job. The homeowner called us back. We took the floor apart. We do set things safe. So you have this organization who’s about safety. We treat them as an organization we want to avoid. You can partner with them and have them do checks in your business. So we had a really good relationship with ours. They helped us on an asbestos loss that an adjuster decided to take a shortcut on removing flooring. And so the asbestos contaminated the entire building. I had the emergency responders, police, fire, ambulance out at scene. We bubble suited everybody up, sent them in, got everybody out of the building. The building needed to be cleaned. It’s a hazardous contamination. Oh and s said, did you have a shower? I said, no. It was minus forty. Okay. We understand why you didn’t have a shower. You shoulda had a shower. I responded in four hours. We’re good. Work with Oh and s. Have them help you with with some stuff in your business. Don’t be afraid to ask them questions. Because you have an industry that is telling you that, hey. There’s no specific regulations that apply to you. You fall under a lot of the other regulations, the general duty clause, construction safety standards. Follow those and work with your OHNS or OSHA. Absolutely. One hundred percent. Yeah. Whenever they design safe yeah. Absolutely. That is that is one of the best things. They are not the boogeyman. Like, I’ve not had a bad experience with them when I’ve gotten trouble because of doing some stuff that we shouldn’t have done. Warranted. We didn’t get fined because they had a relationship with us. They knew we weren’t trying to be that company. So, yeah, hang out there. And we’re gonna take a break here in a few minutes. So I I see a question. We do two breaks. There’s a break coming up now, and then we’ll have another ten minute break shortly. And, and then we just push to the end. These are the other ones. So these are the other standards that you could be using. And then you got ASHRAE, NADACA, IICRC, ASTM. Great standards to refer to. This is why I’m doing this test. I’m gonna do a concrete test in alignment with ASTM standards. I’m following the IICRC standard. Here’s an interesting thing. You’re held to what a reasonable contractor would do. So the standard is if you don’t have the certification, the standard you’re held to is what would a reasonable restorer do. If you were doing fire damage and you weren’t trained in it, are you screwed if you go to court? No. If you follow the standard but you’re not certified in it, they would say, is that what a reasonable restore would do? If you’re certified and you don’t do it, they would still hold you to the same standard. So certification is not the determining factor whether you do a good restoration job. It’s it’s that having that training and certification helps, but you’re held to the standard. And same thing with ASHRAE, ASTM, NADACA. Alright. Sensitized individuals. These are people in Marty King’s fire guidelines. You would have seen this. The RA had a fire guideline, and it was interesting. It says sensitized individuals in when you deal with people, a process for fire or flood restoration should not be a detriment to the occupant. So just because you can do something, like, just because you can degrease a wall doesn’t mean you should degrease a wall if the chemical that you’re gonna apply is gonna cause a detriment to the the individual. Sensitized individuals are people that you may have to work around. And here’s the perfect example of a sensitized individual. Or sorry. Let me give you the argument. An adjuster says that person is lying about their sensitivity. And you say, maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Or you’re like, yeah. I kinda believe they are. The the silicone oh, not silicone. What is it? The gloves. Latex. The latex gloves. If you have a sensitivity to latex gloves and you put one on, you might get a rash from it from wearing it. Now I don’t get a rash, and everyone else on our team doesn’t get a rash, but you get a rash from putting your glove on. Are we gonna tell you that that rash is is psychological, that it’s not real? No. You’re sensitized to latex where nobody else is, and that’s a normal material. That’s not a fire damage. That’s not a chemical. That’s just a normal everyday material, but some people are allergic to latex. Now that allergy could be so severe that they can’t wear the glove. They can’t even touch the glove or be around it. Okay. They might not have such a bad allergy that they can’t even be in a room with it. So the idea that we would say, hey. That sensitized individual is lying. It’s latex. Like, ninety percent of the population can wear latex, but that ten percent can’t. What’s the chances that those fires have chemicals that might impact somebody else? And you’re like, it doesn’t bother me. Okay. Good. You’re not sensitized. Don’t chalk it up to these are psychological issues. These are our problems. Sensitized individuals exist, so your goal is to work around that sensitivity. If we had latex glove issue, we’d put in a different type of glove. Right? We’re use the nitrile gloves. That would eliminate the risk to the latex sensitized individual. On every chemical that you put into a building, you should have the homeowner sign off on it, and they should also do a sniff test to see if they if they have any allergies to it. I’ve had customers that reacted worse to the cleaning chemical than they did the actual loss. So the cleaning chemical is not the option then. And if you put it in, you’re actually doing more damage. Does that make sense? You’re responsible for your chemical use. Just because you have it doesn’t mean you can use it. So one of the things is what happens if we can’t clean? Well, if you don’t have a cleaning solution, then you have to go to replacement. Is the cost gonna go up? Yeah. But that’s how you deal with a sensitized individual. You might have to use lower no v VOC materials. Is there a higher cost to that? Yeah. But you’re gonna price for it because you have a sensitized individual. Does it make sense? These are are things just that’ll trip you up. Okay. Fire health hazards, you’ve got you’ve got respiratory corrosion. Inside some of these fires, you’re gonna have things like sagging pipes. So different types of pipes that get in there, PVC from upholstery, pipe conduits, blinds. Now burning PVC creates a hydrogen chloride and a fos what is it? Phosgen? Phosgen? But you’re looking at these different chemicals that are being produced, and we walk in sometimes without our gear. And then you tell the adjuster that this is a hazardous environment, but every photo has your guys without wearing respirators. Every job is a respirator job until you know that it’s not. That’s that if you come from the OSHA side, it’s a hazard and risk until you know it’s not. And so then you could potentially say then we would put a hygienist on and test. And once we know what we’re dealing with, we’ll we’ll we’ll wear the proper gear for the for the chemicals. I think that is a reasonable and prudent argument for why we need it. When you start to look at fires, you get all these different chemicals that are being formed. So in there, you got ammonium, formaldehyde, benzene, carbon dioxide, hydrogen cyanide. All of these hydrochloric acids all present or could be present in a fire. How are you actively working on this? How are you actively, cleaning this? What cleaning process will take care of these different materials? Chances are your one general purpose cleaner doesn’t do it all. It might. It might do a pretty good job. Does it do it? I don’t know. Can you mix them? I don’t know. Right? We don’t know what you’re you’re dealing with. So you wanna read the SDS sheets on some of these chemicals. We’re gonna jump into risk management. This is a big one when you start looking at, like, assisted living facilities, especially when you get into it. Condos, multifamily, homeowners associations. Right? You get an HOA involved. That’s a liability for you. Hospitals, elderly care. All of this is is happening. Joe had Joe Myers had a nursing home where thirteen nursing homes wanted to build clean rooms, and they ended up putting their COVID patients in the senior homes. And then they they built these clean rooms, and they wanted to use, you know, certain facilities where they they wanted to run the ventilation system a certain way. And they had all these crazy ideas, and and and it eventually killed some some of the occupants. You don’t wanna be a part of that. So when you’re walking into these types of of events or jobs, you wanna make sure that you’re protected. You wanna make sure that you’re not doing work you’re not capable of doing or you’re not trained to do. Hospitals, health care, all have high high high risk occupants. So all the high risk occupants means that you’re gonna have to apply higher levels of care in those environments. Does that make sense? You’re you’re effectively walking into an environment where you have immune deficiencies. People have, you know, sensitivities, allergies, heat sensitivities, you also put a respiratory particulate in the air. You got different ventilation systems that are designed certain ways. You don’t treat it like a residential structure. You just can’t. So you have to have that training, that knowledge when you move into them. But risk management is taking jobs that you’re qualified to do or hiring consultants that can work with you on those technical jobs. Alright. I’m gonna follow-up here, and then we’ll take we’ll take some questions, and we’ll take a Insurance companies, you just gotta think about this in a a different perspective. So I want you to understand that insurance companies don’t own the home. They literally take a premium and say for this year usually, it’s a year. From this date to this date, we insure that property. And anything that bad happens in this contract, we’ll insure from this property. What’s interesting is where I live, if we have a wildfire and your insurance comes due in July or June and there’s a wildfire within it would be sixteen, eighteen miles from your house, you cannot get insurance. They will not insure your house during the wildfire season. So you need to get your your insurance policy dates into the winter. Like, you don’t want a summer date because if you have a fire close to you, your house will be uninsured until that fire is gone. So insurance companies will also maybe not renew your insurance if you have a fire that’s close to your house. Like, your policy date comes up. They’re like, yep. We’re not renewing. So you wanna make sure that you have that coverage. Well, that insurance company is only covering you for a period of time. Remember that the homeowner or the the company you’re dealing with to get paid, that insurance company has a temporary right to to pay pay losses while they’re getting paid a premium. The homeowner owns the entire house. And so homeowners can do whatever they want to their home. They literally could bulldoze the home down if they have small water damage. I use that as an extreme example, but what you’re looking at is the homeowner will give you the direction because they own the property. If they had no insurance, you would not deal with an insurance company. You would deal with a homeowner. The restorer is not obligated to restore the job. So in the IICRC, you’re taught you must respond as quick as possible to reduce the severity of the loss. That’s true from a technical standpoint. It is not true from a business standpoint. You will not run into a job until you’ve done a proper assessment. You’ve done a site safety assessment. You’ve done a contract. And then once you are guaranteed you’re getting paid or feel comfortable you’re getting paid, do you start to take action? You are not gonna go running into jobs and just start restoring stuff and hope to get paid. That’s not how you run a business. And so you’re not obligated by the law to respond. You’re not obligated to follow any regulations of the insurance carrier. You’re responsible to do the job of a contractor, which is get to the job, determine if it’s a job you want, do up the contracts to determine that you’re gonna get paid, and then execute on that contract. If it takes a week for that contract to get signed, whatever resulting damage happens, it’s either between the insurance company or the insured to pay. Not your problem. Okay? So you just gotta look at it from a slightly different viewpoint than the IICRC. Your goal is to minimize the severity of the loss as fast as possible, but not at the detriment. Alright. Let’s do questions, and then we’ll keep moving. Sounds good. So I got you all. I saw just saw a comment from Neil. I I love that quote. We’re we are the professionals who should lead the way through this process. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. K. Sorry. Sorry, Kristen. That’s okay. So how can we justify stabilization cleaning on our estimates? Also, when would stabilization be needed and not needed? Sorry. Can you repeat the first part of that question? Yeah. So how can we justify stabilization cleaning on our estimates? Yeah. So so it’s it it’s a communication with the adjuster. You go ahead and do it, and they’re like, yeah. We didn’t really wanna do it. What did you do? You provided a service to someone who didn’t want it. We’re kind of in that that business where, like, hey. But we saved you some money. Okay. How about we have the conversation with the adjuster and say, hey, mister adjuster. I can go in and I can preclean all the taps and faucets and try to save it. You find out the homeowner doesn’t want those saved. They’re like, no. Replace them. Maybe you should talk to the homeowner and say, hey. Can we get in here and try to mitigate and, like, save your faucets? I’ve had customers where they had, like, twenty five hundred dollar, bathtub faucets. They’re like, yeah. You can’t get them anymore. Save them. So we went in and specifically attacked them. If they’re a Walmart special or, like, a Home Depot special, probably not gonna spend a ton of time saving them because they’re probably not worth it. But it’s the it’s that’s the communication. You look like a hero when you go in and you say to the adjuster, hey. Can we can we walk the site? Or if they’re not if they’re remote on a fire, hey. Can I send you some pictures? I got some I I’d like to try doing some savings for you to save the taps, the faucet, the countertops. Would you mind if I preclean those just so that we we can mitigate the loss? If I don’t do it, they might get etched and give them the risk. Right? You’re selling the job. If I do this, I’m gonna save you money by doing that. If you just go do it and then they get the bill at the end, they’re gonna be like, yeah. I’m not paying you. This is like, you need their approval. So if it slows you down, who cares? Okay. So you lose some other things. Okay. That’s fine. That’s part of the process because the insurance company gets to adjust the claim. They get to approve the how they spend their money. It’s not your money to spend. It’s not the insured’s money to spend. It’s their money to spend. So help them spend it. Give them a justification for spending it. And then for stabilization, if not for stabilization cleaning. For stabilization, if you have high humidity from a fire truck, hey. I’m gonna prevent secondary damage from going to the unaffected parts of the building. So I’m not gonna let condensation go form where it shouldn’t form. We should put dehumidifiers in. Hey. What did I do? I grabbed my thermal hygrometer. I took my readings, and we have a high humidity problem. We’re gonna have a mold a risk of mold. We can mitigate that. We just need to stabilize. Now depending on who you’re dealing with, if it’s an insurance adjuster, the adjuster you telling them in writing that there’s a high humidity that’ll lead to mold and you can solve the problem might prevent the homeowner from getting the exclusion of we don’t pay for mold. Well, you should have paid for stabilization, and you chose not to. So you address it and you provide a solution to a problem. It would be very hard for an insurance carrier to say, no. We didn’t pay for stabilization, and we’re not paying for the mold damage either. Okay. Do you have an exclusion for not stabilizing? And so, like, it leads to a different fight, but it’s not your fight. Your fight is just to tell the homeowner, hey. I can actually prevent this mold, and it might not be covered by your policy, but the mold definitely is not covered by your policy according to your adjuster. Does that answer the question? It’s it’s it’s more communicating how you you approach the job site. Just set up the negatives. Like, there’s a whole there’s a whole there’s a whole philosophy around how do you sell fire damage jobs and how do you approach the loss from start to finish where you you allow the adjuster to know all the risk. You allow the homeowner know all the risk, and then you get them to your scope of work. And and you gotta walk them through it. And it’s really just communicating it. But, like, if you don’t do this, this bad thing will happen. If you don’t do this, this other bad thing will happen. And if this bad thing happens, it may or may not be covered. Like, that’s a real conversation to have. So with water you use to put out the flames, do all the walls need to be removed because of the trapped water or soot? So it’s a great question. You could you could make the argument that contaminants are there. How do you test? Well, you can’t. So it kinda treat it like a category three. There’s no there’s no downside. Now with with fire when there’s so so here’s the thing you run into. The fire the water is technically a category one. It came from, like, let’s say, a sanitary source, and then it hits a contaminant. Not technically a three, but I would I would class as a three. We’re gonna treat it like a three. It’s got contaminants from the fire. So they’re not biologicals, but they’re synthetics, and the standard has language that would would allow you to to treat as a category three. Wet category three materials are coming out, and then we’re gonna wet clean the surfaces to get the, particulate off. Now if it’s fire, I might be ice blasting or we would do a soda blast. All those are acceptable cleaning methods for removing contaminant. So, yeah, I I would treat fireman’s water, like, just if you just wanna simplify it, just treat it as a category three, and that’s how you would approach it. Awesome. So if a structure has sat with smoke damage for an extended period of time, so, for example, two months, do the fixtures need to be replaced? It’s a great question. It depends on your humidity level. So as a restorer, if you get into one of those losses where there’s, like, that long delay, usually, there’s a there’s an investigation that’s taking place. And it so there’s two investigations that will take all the time in the world, arson and then the suspicious loss. So what they do is if it’s suspicious but it’s not arson so so they can’t prove it’s arson or they they suspect it might be tampering with some kind of system. Usually, it’s like an outlet that there’s an indication that the outlet had some kind of metal it shouldn’t have in there. Then they they do a financial background on the insured. So they tell the insured, before we go forward, we’re gonna investigate. And that investigation might look at their financial records to see if this was a financial fire, if there was a motive behind it, and then they start putting pressure on people. That delay is also pressure. So a fire happens and there’s a two month delay while the investigation’s taking place and then you get, you you get told to go forward, There might be corrosion based on the humidity levels in the building. If they didn’t control the humidity in the building, the severity could go up, and so you have it. You’d have to investigate it. Now are you skilled at doing it? No. But you could bring an electrical engineer in to look at it. You could bring an electrician to look at it and let them write a report to say, hey. Based on my professional opinion as electrician, these should be replaced. You as a restorer could make a recommendation that they should be replaced, but yours will hold less weight. You could make an argument that they’re pitted and you can’t clean them. That’s what I would write. If it was about functionality and safety, I would have someone else write it, if that makes sense. So I think we’ll do one more question. I know, everyone’s eager to take a break. So how would you go about cleaning an attached garage that wasn’t necessarily affected with the smoke and soot? Yeah. You you you get into a really good question there. You get into an attached garage, if that door was opened, and usually they are, and depending on the phase of the firefighting process so if they’re doing it when they’re trying to get the smoke out of the building and someone opens the door while the the if you ever watch a fire let’s say that you have a house, and at the front, they’ll put a a high velocity fan in and they’ll blow fresh air in to basically blow the smoke out and and get the house clear. If someone opens a door, that smoke will go into that garage. So it actually pressurizes the garage, and you’ve got contaminant in there. You would treat it just like the rest of the house. So you have to ask the sometimes you’ll see a fire report, or if you suspect that maybe the odor is a little heavier in the garage and you can’t figure out why, you would ask the the the fire chief or whoever was on scene. You you just call up the fire department and say, hey. Can I ask you some questions? And and it helps you build a relationship with the fire department so that you can move it to the next level. It’s like you’re you’re asking them, hey. During your operations, use those terms, during the fire operations, or did you guys open the door while the building was pressurized? Did you pressurize the building? Like, good questions to ask. Why? Because you’re blowing contaminants into parts that it would not normally have got to on its own. And that would then lead you to do a further fire investigation of your own of where would the smoke have been traveling. And so you’ll see these like, you’ll see smoke whisking from the toilet different seams. You can see where the pressurization happened, and you can see the the smoke that had come in through pressurized areas. You might see it around outlets. So if you see that, you you could ask the fire department, hey. Did you pressurize the house? Guess what? The damage is probably more severe for what you have to do is you’re gonna have to tear out more building than if they didn’t pressurize the house. Right? If it was, a cold smoke fire and they just came in and didn’t do anything. But if they were running a full fire operation, they probably had the fan running at the end. Your job probably got harder. So, yeah, I’d be asking those questions. And then an attached garage, clean it like every other room except for it’s got a ton of shit in there, and you gotta deal with it. Right? Like, there’s a lot of junk in there. You might have a different contents process. You might say, hey. Is there anything that you just wanna get rid of? And then you would write it off as, like, not not to be replaced. And so then they can settle with the insurance company as, like, an actual cash value settlement. That’s a discussion with the adjuster and homeowner. Like, hey. We’re gonna clean your garage out. Is there stuff you wanna get rid of? And if it’s reasonable, like, if the insured is reasonable, they’ll say, hey. I’m not gonna replace that item. I’ll take the cash. And so the adjuster and them can negotiate that. Yeah. It’s a good question. It’s it’s like every other part of the house. You might find that in in attics too. Right? The attic wasn’t directly impacted, but all of a sudden, you found smoke got into the attic, and now you have to remove the insulation so you can do your job. Let’s get into the four steps of fire remediation. This is something that I’ve I’ve changed my views on over the years, so I wanna share this with you. And and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that we look at. So we know water jobs are complex. And then when we look at a water damage job, there’s different things that you can consider. But all of a sudden, you have to add in all this. Like, if we’re looking at water, you do water. And if you don’t do water right where it sits, it can lead to mold. It could have preexisting mold there. We have lead as best as another hazards. K. Cool. But when you look at fire damage, the reason why fire damage, I think, is so much more difficult is you have all this that you have to pile on top of that. So water damage is really hard as a general rule. It’s like water damage and water damage restoration is difficult. Fire damage with water damage is a total different degree of difficulty, and we don’t necessarily look at it that way. The old way we used to look at is like, oh, I got my fire damage training, and I got water damage training, and I’m good. But your your degree of difficulty isn’t just twice as hard. It’s exponentially more hard because you got all these other things that you’re now factoring into your loss. So here’s what I wanna do. I wanna start this off with with a poll here from you guys. And in here, what percentage of your jobs do you place oxidizers or other older control measures on at the start of your jobs? And, again, your honesty is is not gonna be, recognized one way or another. Is yes, no, seventy five to a hundred percent, fifty to seventy five, twenty five to fifty, or zero to twenty five, or we dilute the air, but we don’t treat it. And what’s interesting is you guys are giving us a feedback. So this will dictate the conversation for the next, probably, fifteen minutes. And what we’re doing is we’re seeing a lot of people in the, in the seventy five fifty to a hundred percent. So so a lot of people there, and now the numbers are bumping up on the bottom end of that poll. And what’s wild here is this is how we go into jobs, and and I don’t think a lot of people talk about this in the right context of what are we doing. So in this section, I wanna I wanna break that down, and I wanna give that a proper discussion because I think you should look at it a little bit different than maybe we were taught. And it should help your business if you have this discussion. I think it’s gonna help your business in in what you’re doing. Alright. Let’s, let’s kill the poll, and here’s the results. Is it’s anywhere between zero and twenty five. Pretty even across the board is is it’s being done a lot on most jobs. Very few to few of you are not, not treating the area. You’re just diluting it. And that’s, I’m gonna say, how we were trained. The reason we were trained is like, hey. You have all this gear. You have all these chemicals. You have all this stuff you could put into the business or into a fire. But at the end of the day, what should you be doing? And I’m I’m glad you guys answered. This will be a good discussion. So the four steps of fire remediation is source removal, cleaning, deodorization, and then applying surface sealants. And what’s interesting is you can’t you can’t not clean the surface and do surface sealants. Even though that’s what happens in the industry, you can’t do that. That the the the product label says that’s not how you apply the product. But that’s sort of how the industry has evolved. Maybe sales reps have said, yeah. Yeah. Don’t worry about cleaning. Just spray it over. It won’t it won’t have an odor. It may not come out this side. It could go out the other side and then come back around into your building. So that’s why this that that theory doesn’t make sense. But when we look at the four steps of restoration, what you do is you basically come in, and you should look at the degree of effort. So this is how the degree of effort on your job should look. You should put a lot of effort at the beginning on source removal. We remove the source. We then clean the environment. Whatever’s left, we deodorize. Anything we can’t get the deodorization to work on, we maybe would consider sealing. And when we start to look at that, it’s like, okay. Well, what what makes fire damage different than, say, normal cleaning? And so what you do is you just put it up against like, it it was an epiphany for me when I went back, and I said, if I were to look at how we clean other things in our world, does this make sense? Because the way we were trained doesn’t make sense to me. We say it, but then all of a sudden, you’re presented with there’s, like, no source removal, like, technology. It’s all, you know, source removal, rip it out. Cleaning is is elbow grease, and then everybody’s got these deodorization products and solutions are selling you. And so you get trapped in this marketing hype. But if we were to look at bringing in, I don’t know, a dog and you have an accident on your floor, what’s your source or what’s your what’s your course of action? Your course of action is you’re gonna focus on source removal and cleaning the surface. You don’t come in and bring an ozone machine or hydroxyl in, and you don’t seal the floor after that accident happens. You remove the source and you clean. And you say, okay. Well, what happens when we get another example like garbage? Well, in a garbage bag, you remove the source. If the garbage bag were to break a leak, you’d remove the source and you clean. If it’s a really bad garbage thing, you might spray for breeze in the air. That’s the product they sell you and say, hey. That makes the odors go away, but you’re applying a chemical inside your building that’s just making the air smell fresh, but your real source is re source removal cleaning, then that that that odor counteractant, you’re just spraying it into the air. So when we look at fire, well, it changes. Why are we looking at fire remediation any differently? This is how you should be doing it. This is how you actually are doing it for the most part as an industry. We come in, and we deodorize. And we deodorize before we clean, we deodorize while we clean, and we deodorize after we clean. So we’re hitting this with a lot of chemicals and products and and call it a contaminant of its own that we’re applying to the job. We remove the source. We take the char out. Then we clean the surfaces, which might be dry ice blasting, could be soda, could be sanding, could be wiping. And then we get into what’s left do we deal with. And what’s interesting is this deodorization process is a lot. And if you don’t clean, how would you put this in a in a perspective? If you were to look at what’s the volume of odor when you walk into a brand new fire, It’s huge. How much oxidizer would you need to make that huge amount of odor disappear? A lot more. If you were to remove the source and shrink that level down and you were to clean and shrink that level down, how much deodorizer, hydroxyl, or ozone do you need to make this go away? That much. So you’re exposing the building to a lot more chemicals. And what we saw in some of the disputes I’ve been part of is that the hydroxyls and the ozone that’s being applied to jobs is actually being applied while you’re using chemicals that say do not expose to oxidizers. So your chemicals will say do not expose to oxidizers, and yet you’re running an oxidizer right next to the chemical. What happens when that happens? It breaks the chemical down, and you get adverse effects on it. Just grab one of your cleaning products off the shelf. The next time you’re out back, at the next break, just go grab a product. Read the label on your fire contaminant cleaner and see what your degreaser say. If it says you’re not exposed to an oxidizer and the first thing you’re doing is oxidizing, you’re already starting off on the wrong foot. The other thing is you haven’t found the source. So you’re not removing the source. You haven’t found the source of the odors, and you’re starting to knock them down. How are you gonna find the contaminant? Visually? It’s microscopic stuff that we’re dealing with that have odors on a microscopic level. Why would you knock the odor down before you start? So we’ve been told in marketing, hey. Knock the odor down. You make all the psychological smell go away. What if it wasn’t psychological smell? What if it was highly sensitized individuals that have a better sense of smell than us? We’ve been desensitized the smell. Now what you’ve done is you’ve gone and knocked down the contaminant smell. The thing that you’re gonna use to try to determine if it’s clean, you’re knocking that smell down before you started to clean. Why would you do that? Psychologically, I don’t believe I can’t remember somebody that walked into a house and went, wow. This this house smells like smoke because I saw it with smoke. Maybe, but I can’t remember a job where that happened with a homeowner. So I don’t think it’s as common. I think it was what we used to say was a legend that we used to have, which is, oh, they smell smoke. I don’t smell smoke, so it’s psychological. They must have been traumatized from the fire. I just don’t buy it because you just don’t see it. If we were to look at source removal, this is source removal. Removing insulation that is inside the building, taking burnt materials out, taking the debris that’s falling on the floor, that’s source removal. Right? If we were to look over here, how do we remove this source? Take all of that contaminant out of the building. What about heat damaged materials? We talked about this earlier. You’ve got heat damaged materials. So in a case like this, when you’re looking at this, what do we have for heat damage? Well, you got heat damaged drywall, some cabinets, some some roof sheathing. You didn’t see any discoloration on the on the roof on the other side, but here you’ve got on the sheathing, you got some discoloration. Trusses that are are scorched. Right? As we look up, you can see that, yeah, that that might be a problem. Do we have any of that debris that’s under that that, truss? You got a little bit of debris under that truss. Maybe you have some smoke trapped in between there. If I knock the smoke smell down and then I deal with that, but I don’t deal with what’s around the truss, how do I how do I properly mitigate it? So our seniors home, we didn’t even focus on it. We literally just were like, yeah. I think we could seal it in and just go. And we didn’t worry about smoke odor. It came back, and it was pungent in the wintertime when the humidity levels were high. When we look at ceilings like this, we go, okay. What else are we looking at? Electrical wires are heat damaged. Well, that electrical has to be replaced. Okay. Here’s here’s a poll that we’re gonna do. What would you do with this truss? If this truss is damaged with here, what are we gonna do? What would you do with the truss? And here’s your poll questions. You can clean it. You can seal it. You can media blast it. You can repair it, put a sister or a new board next to it, or you could just come and replace it altogether. So you got some replaces. Replace it with sister boards next to existing, media blast it, seal it, clean it. Right? You got a whole bunch of options here, and we’ll give you guys a couple more seconds to get that in. And while you’re answering it, I’ll see if we can throw up my slide. See if I can move that back so you can take another look at it. Right? K. So here’s here’s where we’re at. We’ve got a few people said clean it. There’s a few seal it, a few media blast it. So we’re, like, twenty percent say media blast. Repair it, sister bores next to existing or replace it. And, that’s awesome. We’re about two hundred respondents in. You could kill that poll for a second, but can you leave it on the screen, Kristen? Just kill it and and leave it on the screen. I’m just gonna move ahead here. Because and I don’t know how it looks for you guys, but I’m hoping it looks good. I’m gonna move my poll off my screen because I think there’s probably a box there. When we look at trusses, we’ve got this truss coming in. And so you get this the forces of a truss, these are engineered structures. They’re engineered to transfer energy. And so the the they’re carrying the load of the roof and the and what you see is that deflection. The load is coming in off the roof, and so these are engineered structures. They have a stamp on them, and that stamp requires an engineer to approve that these are still good for that load. In the past, we would usually just walk up and tack some boards together and be like, hey. We did a pretty good job. We we repaired it that way. But these carry liability. And so a trust is engineered to go into a building to do a specific job. It’s not engineered to be sister’d up with another board. That’s an engineer that has to make that call. There is I don’t know how many homes have things that we repaired without asking an engineer. Right? That’s just how we did it. So we took on that responsibility. Now here’s what’s interesting. I’m gonna pull pull forward one more time because I wanna talk about this, and I and and, Christine, you could drop that poll. I’ll I’ll come back. I in here, on this side, we have the we have the joist in here. Now here or, sorry, the rafters. Here’s what we’re looking at. You’ve got these gusset plates. These gusset plates have a low tolerance to heat. So the second that they get heated, there’s expansion that happens in the wood. The wood expands and contracts. Those gusset plates are a concern. Sometimes you’ll see in a fire, they come out, and you the old way used to be just go hammer them back in. No. Once they come out, that’s that system has failed. You are not a repairer of that system. In here, when we look at it, these gusset plates have heat damage. So that engineered system has now been compromised. You don’t know what the temperature is. All we know that we went from from an aluminum color to black or galvanized color to black. It’s got exposed to heat. That’s for an engineer sign off. The other thing we’re looking at is we’re looking at these trusses. And we used to come in and say, oh, alligatoring. No problem. Just as long as it’s a quarter inch deep, you’re good. We’re not qualified to make that call. We can restore it. So if an engineer says, yeah, take the char off and you’re good, cool. That’s what we do. But we’re not qualified as a as a restoration contractor. None of our restoration training qualifies us to that. So we’re going to go in, and we’re gonna follow an engineer. Now if I am looking at this, this would be a replace. We’re gonna take this out. We’re not gonna assist her to it. If an engineer says, hey. You can clean this. I would probably go with a media blast. I’m gonna remove the soot char and get into the the wood, and we’re gonna remove the surface of that wood. That’s gonna be our first thing. Now the other thing you have to think about is what heat was this exposed to. Is this a heat damaged member? So, yes, we can remove the char. Did the heat compromise it? And as a restorer, you can ask that question. You can say, hey. This was a high enough heat to put some char on here. Is the member compromised? In this particular case, this roofline, we replaced an engineer came through and said replace everything to the last member and one passed it. So the engineer actually went every member of this chart gets gets removed plus one. And I was like, okay. That actually makes kinda sense. Like, maybe it was exposed to more heat down there, and it didn’t discolor. But they went every every member gets removed plus one on each side. And so that’s how they repaired this roof. There was no discussion on on what we should do. There was no cistering. In here, when we talk about heat damage, we used to use the the the smoke line, and we would say this is the demarcation line of where the heat was. And that was incorrect. So that was the old way we were taught is, hey. This is the we we used to use the term this the heat line. Well, that’s the smoke demarcation line of where the smoke was the heaviest. And what you’re seeing in this picture is where where those nail pops are or where the screws are and where the studs are, well, those were cold areas. So what happened is that hot smoke bonded to the colder surface, and the the screw heads being colder bonded to it. Now there’s also potential there’s electrical charge in there that went to the metal, and you get some electrical bonding that happens there as well. Well, there’s a there’s a thermal dynamic at play, maybe an electrical dynamic at play. And so if you see the nail head pops, you used to say, hey. Well, that’s that’s where the heat was, so you you replace that drywall. That wasn’t scientifically there. There’s your smear of your wet soot. Someone’s decided to see if it’s wet. Yep. Still wet here. Still wet there. Now that’s more than likely that’s firefighters during the operation. So they’re smearing it around as they walk by, touching for surfaces. You’ll it’s common you’ll see this. If it’s a really heavy smoke damage, sometimes you’ll see, like, a hand. Like, as if someone just walked the wall. If it was really smoky, that’s how the firefighter is gonna walk the the environment during a smoke during the firefighting operations is they’re gonna keep touch contact with the right side wall. That’s how they’re gonna get into the fire. They turn around, and that’s how they’re gonna go out the fire. So it could be from that as well. But here’s an interesting thing. This came from I think it was operation or project Flashpoint sorry. Operation flashover, and this was a thermal imaging camera that they ran. There’s a video there. And what happened is they ran the thermal imaging camera, and they show up here. Okay. So you’ve got a little bit of smoke and heat up here. Oh, the smoke line is coming down. K? So that’s there. We can see the temperature in the three hundred degree mark. And then in that little picture in picture, you see the fire as it’s as it’s developing. And then what you notice in the last picture here, what you’re seeing is that’s the smoke line just above the couches, but you’re seeing that the temperature is over three hundred and fifty degrees on the floor. In the past, we would look at the smoke line, and then basically everything down, we’d be like, well, there was no heat there. And what this is showing is that radiant heat is going down into that flooring material and into the couch. And in the video, you’ll actually see the the couch starting to smoke as the heat started to off gas the the the the materials out of the the the furniture. In the real world, it would look like this. These chairs were exposed to real high temperatures. If you look at those lights in between the two chairs, you can see the lights have melted. And so this was, like, the smoke line and or sorry. The demarcation line is down at the floor. It’s like a foot off the floor, and you can see that there was high levels of heat coming down. That couch, you would think was smoke damage, but it’s actually heat damage. That’s that that couch has been burned. That TV was one of those old cold large plasmas fell over. It’s all melted out. So the amount of heat that’s come down from this from the ceiling down is gone past that that like, well past the smoke demarcation line. Or so you’re you’re seeing that, and you’re like, oh, well, then the heat must have got to the floor. Yeah. Everything in this house got torn out. But what you’re starting to see is there’s no correlation between a heat line demarcation line, sorry, of the smoke and where the heat is. You could have a high temperature heat in a very low area up up top doing heat damage to the bottom. So we our old senses of what, like, we thought was happening, not quite true. Lot more things are heat damaged than smoke damage in in a high temperature fire. If you look over here, that’s the arm. The I was the adjuster on this one. So I was the guy coming in going, hey. What do you think on this? But I had been a contractor. So when we were asking, said, hey. What do think about this? He’s like, I think we could clean it. I’m like, I don’t think you can. It was heat damage. But his reaction was the same as mine. Maybe it’s cleanable. The reality is in furniture, you’re gonna get such high temperature push of that smoke going to the cold insides of the the couch. Makes it really hard to clean. Like, a cold smoke is where you might do furniture cleaning. A high temperature environment makes it much harder. So that’s why you gotta try to understand what type of fire are you dealing with because then that’s gonna dictate whether you have more restorable stuff or more replaceable stuff. Alright. Calcination is the next it’s it’s the hard one that we can’t see. There’s no easy way to see it. And calcination is something that we need to be cautious of. So it’s in drywall. When you superheat drywall, it releases its crystallized water that’s in the drywall. So in the manufacturing process, it’s what gives drywall its fire rating. You get crystallized water. It represents about twenty one percent of the weight of the drywall is this crystallized water that’s inside the drywall. In there, that’s bonded. It’s a chemically bonded water to the drywall. It’s made in the manufacturing process. The calcination is the process of that water leaving the chemical bond when it gets heated and is being released. It starts at about three hundred Fahrenheit. It can start a little bit lower. I’ve seen numbers on, like, two sixty Fahrenheit or a hundred and twenty three Celsius. But what effectively is happening is at the boiling point of water, the crystallized water will boil off. And so drywall, the reason it’s a fire barrier is it doesn’t transfer heat higher than two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit. That crystallized water will keep its surface temperature on the back of the drywall at as high as the boiling point of water, two hundred and twelve degrees. That’s how the fire rating works, is it’s constantly off gassing or or releasing it to moisture during a fire. And so when they put this into kiln or they they they test it with a torch, they’re running, like, two thousand degrees or eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit on the drywall, and it’s not getting higher than two hundred twelve degrees. That you cannot rehydrate. So if you have a fire and the the heat comes down and let’s say demarcation line’s here. Well, we had over three hundred degrees down here. All that drywall is coming out. All of it’s coming out. But what we used to do is say, hey. Let’s just go to the the line, cut above the line, leave the rest. Right? You do some stuff like that where you’re like, oh, look. The line is, a foot from the ceiling. We’re good. Pull the gyp rock. You can’t tell. There’s a test that you can do, but it’s it’s not as reliable. There’s a coloration that you can see in it. When in doubt, tear it out. It’s your fire rating. It’s the way the the gyprock was engineered. It can’t be rehydrated. So in a fire where there’s high heat, pull it out. If it’s a cold fire where the smoke just transferred through the building, you’re fine. It it becomes an is there something behind the cavity? But this is a big one that a lot of restorers miss, and they misdiagnose because of the old way we were taught. In there, you cannot restore the process of calcination, nor can you like, you can’t add high humidity back to it and get it to bond. There’s a certain amount of water that can be put back into the board, but, one, is it economically feasible? Two, do you have a way of testing it? And three, is that what we’re gonna do? No. None of those questions. So you’re gonna put new drywall in for sixteen dollars a sheet or eight dollars a sheet. You’re just not gonna dick around with it. It just doesn’t make any sense to take on any liability, especially if you’re in multifamily where you have a firewall, where you have a rated firewall. Why would you take any chances you gotta pull that up? Does that make sense, guys? You gotta pull something that you believe is heat damage, and your your reason for removing drywall would be calcination, that it was impacted by temperatures that you believe to be more than three hundred degrees. And how do you believe that? The physical damage to the environment. The carpet is singed below, which means we had heat on the floor, which means that we had heat going down. And that’s part of your documentation you’re reporting. K. Question time. Boom. Boom. We’re into the questions. Awesome. So is calcination determined by visuals only? There’s a pressure test you can do. I don’t have a picture of it. There’s a tool that can test the pressure of of calcination for what we do. Like, you’re not trained in the tool. You’re not certified in the tool. You’re doing it with a visual observation. I would if you had a high heat scenario where, like, lights are melted, you come down and ornaments are melted, you’re just gonna say, hey. For, like, the extra four dollars for that sheet of drywall, tear the drywall, like, floor to ceiling. If you’re in like, you’re almost better off. Like, you then you get into, like, okay. So you’re gonna cut four feet. Okay. Like, you’re gonna save the bottom half of the drywall. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense because you’re gonna spend a lot more time trying to repair four feet of drywall going up. So it it becomes a your determination is pull it out. Now there’s there’s visual. There’s a there’s a coloration that happens. It goes from, like, a grayish to white. You could do that, but I I just I wouldn’t. So what, if anything, plastic would you try to save if it got sooted up? So plastic with soot and now now now is it cold soot or a hot soot. Right? So plastic when it gets heated anything when it gets heated normally opens its pores on a microscopic level. It’ll open its pores. That’s why you try to recreate the conditions of the fire. So if you had no. Not gonna get to the same temperatures, but if you had a plastic get up to a hundred Fahrenheit, let’s say that the pore is normally like this, but then it opens up to that at a hundred. You’re gonna try to recreate that so that you can get your product in to deal with that that, smoke particulate. Because at at room temperature, it’s closed up. Plastics are susceptible. Like, they’ve got a lower melting point, so their molecules on a microscopic level will open up more. If it was a cold smoke, you should be able to wipe them off. No problem for most plastics. If it sat and got wet, maybe they get etched. Like, Maybe they have a chemical reaction to the byproducts of the fire mixed with the water creates a new acid that they’re not resistant to. And so it it kinda depends. What’s the value of the plastics you’re trying to save? Are you trying to save a Rubbermaid, like, tub? Who cares? Throw it out. If you think it’s, like, just a a light soot on top that you can wipe off, sure. Go for it and charge three dollars for that bin wipe down. Like, you just you have to weigh the cost versus, like, is that where you wanna take risk? And, you know, some some Rubbermaid containers are good, and, like, the HD plastic containers seem to be pretty good at not holding odors. Rubbermaid, not as good. If you have a Rubbermaid container, it seems to hold odors a lot more. Is that the chemical compounds? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s a decision. Right? It’s a it’s a restoration decision. You’re the one on-site. Test clean it. Test did the test cleaning work? Like, that’s the other thing. We make a lot of calls when we walk into a job that, yeah, that we can clean this. You haven’t tried this. You don’t know what was in that fire. Was it was it plastics in the fire, chemicals in the fire? Like, what are you trying to clean? Every time you go into a job, don’t know if we clean it. I think we can clean it. We’re gonna test clean it to to verify. And then you’re gonna see if that cleaning process works. And then if it doesn’t, you’re like, no. I didn’t test clean. Like, why accept liability for something you have no understanding if it’s gonna work? And you know what I mean? Like, it’s it’s you set the you set the expectation when you come in and say I can clean everything and then nothing gets cleaned. You look like you don’t know what you’re doing. But if you went in saying, hey. This is a bad fire. I think I can clean some things, but I can’t clean everything. And then all of a sudden you get into it and you’re like, hey. It’s not really responding. You will reset the expectation. It probably wouldn’t respond. You look like a hero if it comes back and you’ve cleaned eighty, ninety, you know, percent of the contents. So you had mentioned earlier about cleaning old soot around a fireplace, as this can hold contaminants and odors. Can you expand on that a little bit? Do you full, do you full chimney shoots do full chimney shoots, sorry, need to be cleaned for this reason? Yeah. It it it comes in that let let’s say your fireplace, and you could use, like, an old school just like so everyone’s visualizing the same. Like, one of those old school fireplaces where where you throw the logs in and it’s open. So it’s not a wood stove. That chimney normally gets wood smoke up it, but then you had a fire and that chase allows plastics to go into it. You could try burning it off after, but that’s not really our job is to, like, hey. Let’s light a fire and see what happens in that chimney. So I would do a clean of it. It’s it’s it’s a there’s creosote. So creosote’s a a byproduct of wood that when it when the wood gets cool, it’ll form inside the chimney, and then normally you try to sweep it off. Right? You try to remove it because it can it’s it’s kinda like a wood oil. It’s it goes in wet, and then it’s it’s solidifies, and then it’s preflammable. You might not want that mixed in with plastic, so you would just do a chimney sweep. Why would you not do that? It’d be like the same as going to a restaurant where there’s normally grease, but now you mix grease with plastics that burned. You’re gonna clean the ventilation system. You’re gonna clean the grill really well. Same thing with fireplace. Just because it’s it’s a wood fire doesn’t mean you’re not gonna put some attention to it. Jim, what’s your justification? Oh, the fireplace had, you know, a lot of damage around it, and we’re gonna now clean around it and clean the the chimney. I justify. What’s your justification? I think you can do it if you have a reasonable argument. And the argument I would just make around a a fireplace is it normally burns wood, and in here, we burn plastics and everything else. We’re gonna clean that chimney and remove that odor of the plastics, not the smoke odor, the the odor of the plastics. We gotta get the contaminants to have plastics. And then, honestly, on your first burn, you probably burn off everything else because you got the stack effect. So all your contaminants are going up and out of the fireplace, but you still need to do some kind of cleaning. Without using hygienes, how would you know what respirator filters you need? So go heavy. The higher level protections are better. I’m I’m a fan now. Now we rolled into it late in my business. So we had half face respirators until I realized that they’re not as safe as full face. And then when I had my guys in full face and I realized they didn’t work as fast as they did when we put them in PAPRs, we put them all in PAPRs, or at least we gave them that option. And then your filters is is selecting your filter. So when in doubt, like, that one job where you need to supply their respirator, it’s better to have a respirator than no respirator. Right now, I’m gonna say the majority of our fire damage jobs, project managers, adjusters, and technicians walk in without any gear. So some respirator is gonna be better than that. And then if you go into testing, then you know exactly what you’re dealing with and how to protect yourself. But for filters, it’s like, put put the organic vapor gas filter on. And then, you know, how should you be doing it? You should be going in in a in a a supplied air respirator until you test if you were, like, to take the extreme position, which if you look at the firefighter, they go in at SCBA. So they go in and supplied air. They go in. They do their thing, and they come out. And then fire investigators wear full face respirators when the fire is cooled. I’m hoping they have enough science that that’s good because that’s what kinda we’re relying on is that they’re there. But they’re only there, let’s say, for a day to do a fire investigation. We’re there for a week or two doing a cleaning. Maybe we’re protected, maybe we’re not. And, like, that’s sort of where the industry right now is honestly at a crossroads. My safety hat says we should be geared up more than we are. The science just hasn’t been tested, so I don’t know where we sit. Right? We don’t have enough science. There’s a few few friends of mine that were taking samples. I don’t know if if Bob’s on here, but I got a couple guys are firefighters and restorers, and we’re taking samples and getting the test results of, like, what’s happening during the fire, what’s happening immediately after the fire, and then what’s happening during the cleaning process. And I’m hoping that they’re gonna have the data that we can write an article on. But there’s some there’s some restorers looking at it that are safety minded. Oh, wow. Yeah. That’s awesome. I wanna shift gears a little bit because we’ve gotten a lot of really awesome situational questions. So we’re we are currently working on a fire that started with a battery in a garage. Many tools with rubber, metal, plastic components were present. We have cleaned the soot off with the HEPA vac, hand wiped down, and treated with ozone, but the odor persists. Do you have any advice on removing the odors? So it’s it’s a it’s a hard question to answer without being there because you have to ask, are you cleaning in place or are you cleaning off-site? So it sounds like you’re doing a clean in place, which is really hard in any situation. Like, your your goal would be to separate the contents from the building and then restore the building and then restore each individual item, and then everything should come back easy. But if you’re trying to do it all in one, how do you prevent cross contamination? So if you were trying to prevent cross contamination, you might set up a negative pressure on one end of the of the the garage and bring fresh air in from another. Doesn’t quite work that way. Like, the real world that you got swirling winds. Like, is think about, like, doing a water damage. I’m not a fan of cleaning on-site. I think it’s like, the jobs I’ve seen like, I end up seeing most of the fights that come in front of me where we have arguments is that people did clean on-site. There’s a very limited scope when I would clean on-site where you have a clean room, like a garage, that you protected and you decided that that’s where you’re gonna clean. And economically, it’s like four hours to get it to your shop or something. In an everyday business, pack that thing out, get the building clean, do what you gotta do with the building, identify you’re playing with too many variables. So I’m not a big fan of clean on-site. It’s taught in restoration as, like, a limited option, and it’s used way more because adjusters are like, it’s cheaper. It’s not cheaper. You will run into more problems like you’re having doing a clean insight. And then I’m I’m assuming you’re doing a clean on-site. But if you’re you’ll run into a ton of problems, especially with, like, a battery fire. So is it is it a a lithium ion? Is it is it a normal car battery where you’re dealing like, a deep cycle where you’re dealing with, like, lead? So you have all these other things that you might be contaminating the environment with that you have to check to see how your cleaning process is. It it becomes a technical job. And so it’s a lot bigger than, hey. This is just a little bit of wood smoke from from the fireplace. Right? But it’s hard to answer when you’ve like, there’s a lot of variables. I’d I’m I’ll I’ll make assumptions for and then be totally wrong. So We have another one. We had a situation where the texture was more like stout sorry, stalagmites. We could not clean it without destroying it. Customer refused to let us remove and insisted on it being sealed instead. We hit it with the fogger to try and clean it. What would you recommend to do? So so that’s where you deviate from a standard to the real world. And so the way you approached it would be, hey. Our recommendation is you remove it. Homeowner says you can’t remove it because I wanna keep it. Okay. So the next option is we could attempt to seal it. But you have to understand, you’ve got a porous material that you’re putting a sealant on one side. I’m gonna assume it’s drywall on the other side. So let’s say that you have a you have you you now put a seal here and you have a smoke odor now trapped in this porous material on the drywall. It can’t come out the sealant. It can only go through the drywall. At some point, that odor is gonna permeate its way through the drywall on the other side, and then you’re gonna get a smoke smell back. Your job is to say that’s the risk and sign off on it. And the contaminants might have a hazard in it, which could be hazardous to your health. Sign off on it. After that, it’s their decision. They sign off and say, yeah. Your lawyer is gonna try to protect you as much as possible, but or you’re like, hey. That’s too much of a risk. I don’t know what like, depends what burned. No. You know what? We’ll walk away from this job. It’s just not a job we wanna be working on. And that’s a fair fair answer too. Like, you don’t have to restore every. In in restoration, we restore everything. The call comes in. We do it. In the real world and any other job, you’re like, no. That one doesn’t really fit what we do. We don’t have that. The IICRC hasn’t taught you to walk away. They say respond quick and then do your job, and your job is maybe sometimes you walk away. But as a general rule, explain what the risk is of of of them doing it, and then let them make a decision. It’s their house. Yeah. Alright. We good, Kristen, to go on, you got one more? I I do have one more that’s kinda quick, if you don’t mind. Sure. So, there’s just a individual that’s asking if there’s any similar criteria for determining heat damage to framing members or a rule of thumb for evaluating heat damage to conventionally framed structures. So it’s a good question. Wood reacts a little different than drywall. Wood wood can case harden. You could you could there’s no scientific way, but there is, like, driving a nail into a rafter that has suspected heat damage. You’ll you’ll get the cells. On a molecular level, you’ll get the the wood cell will collapse. Like, when we overdry. Right? So we know when we overdry wood, we can get what they call case hardening where we actually collapse the cell of the wood, and it can’t it can’t expand. It would just we we on a microscopic level, we damage the wood. In a fire, the same thing’s gonna happen. Right? High heat hits it. You damage it. What you could do to show that it’s heat damaged is you could drill a nail or drive a nail in an undamaged rafter and then go down to the area that had heat and try to drive the same nail. And what you’ll see with case hardening is that nail will go through, like, the old fur. Remember the old like, if you ever do, like, those heritage homes, like, nineteen hundred homes, they’re they used wood that was just hard, like, super dense. So you drive a nail into that, and it’s hard. You’ll see that same thing in the softwoods is it’ll harden, but your your nail on the other end will go in like a normal like, putting it into a stud. Right? Putting it into a just normal dimensional lumber. But if it’s been case hardened, it will be harder to drive. That would be your indicator. I don’t know of any other way of doing it. You could test the moisture content of it and see what your moisture content is. I would suspect after a fire, that would be really low, two, three, four percent if it if it if it heated up that high. You could use that and be like, our normal dry standard is is seven, and now we have three over here. That would be a good indicator as well. So we’ve got this the four steps of of cleaning, and we get into to the or sorry. Four steps of restoration. We get into our cleaning. This is where we spend a ton of time. This is where we would actually make our money as restorers and spending our time on it. This is the most important step. So if you were to say take all the charred soot and ash, the next thing is is how good can you clean? How much cleaning are you doing? What are you gonna clean? What products are you gonna apply to clean? And can you remove the contaminants? That’s one of your best tools is the HEPA vacuum. You’ve got the the particulate lands on the surface, and before you you rub it into the surface, you can actually vacuum it up. And these are amazing tools for getting the bulk contaminant removed. We’re very quick to run to whatever, you know, go go juice that you put into a bottle and spray it, but this is actually your best step. So doing a HEPA sandwich where you HEPA vac, wipe it down, and then any of the particulate that was in the air, you HepaVac again. Pretty effective methodology of of doing a fire clean. You might just HepaVac and wipe, and that might be your process. So depending on how you go forward, this would work. When we look at jobs, like, before cleaning, you’ve got drywall on the ground. Like, this is what we’re looking at, bulk removal. So we’re removing source. We have contaminants on rafters. Post remediation clean, you start looking at it, you’re like, well, how clean is it? Well, we’ve got stuff in in the way. We’ve got some boards. Have they been wiped? You know, on the right hand side, you’ve got some electrical stuff that’s down. So so this is post remediation cleaning. It’s gonna be different. It’s an easier clean when you’re doing a construction cleanup. But I’m still looking, do we have contaminants? There’s a lot of jobs where you have a fire damaged job, and the level of clean on that job is very minimal. Like, you still have soot in particulate or construction dust from the when the home was originally built. And you go, well, how is that possible that you did a fire clean and all this original soiling and contaminants is here? How did you clean around that? You didn’t. And so it was an incomplete clean, and then we can’t figure out why the smell’s there. And that’s because we’re gonna rely on the technology to lower our cleaning bill. That’s not when an insurance company that like, traditionally, that’s not what insurance companies were looking at reducing cost. It used to be clean would be a less lesser cost than replace. Now it’s let’s do a lesser job cleaning to lower the cost. You’re exposing your company and that insurance company up to massive lawsuits. Like, it is exponential how much more risk you’re taking when you do that. What you’re trying to do is tell the adjuster in this it’s, again, it’s it’s positioning your job. If I don’t do anything, I have to remove all of these materials that I maybe could clean, but I’m just gonna remove them. That’s a hundred thousand dollars. If I clean, I can save you forty thousand dollars with my cleaning bill. There’s not really another option to be like, I can only do partial cleaning for thirty, and we hope we’re for the best. Like, that doesn’t work. It’s like, saved you forty, but it’s gonna cost you something. And that’s what your job is as a professional restorer is to communicate what the the differences are and where you can’t go. And a lot of restorers just don’t know. They’re like, I guess the adjuster knows better than me, so they said don’t do this, so I’m not doing it. No. You’re now on the hook for it. This is what would a post clean for paint look like. So in here, for paint, look how how how ready that is. But if I’m doing a mitigation, I’m coming back and being like, hey. That’s part of that cleaning process. And I’m talking about contractors that pass the job over to the next contractor. Well, the next contractor, like, what level are they getting? So if they’re going from the fire damage, and then we’re gonna do the demo, and then we do a demo post remediation clean, does this qualify as post remediation clean? Like, is there contaminants there? It’s electrical. Like, there’s a lot of electrical stuff, some insulation, but ready for paint. I should have no smoke odors at this stage. At this stage of the game, we should be, like, no odors in here at all. And that’s your job as a restorer is to get the job ready for rebuild, and you’re like, oh, I took care of all the odors. There’s no odors. We recreate the conditions. We heat the building up, increase the humidity. No odors. We’re good. Put the building back, have the homeowner sign off, and now anyone can restore it. Hopefully, if you do full service, it’s you. If not, that’s cool too. Like, if you’re just a mitigation company, your job is to make sure the smoke odor is gone. You did your job if you did that. Now what happens if you if you ramp the the process up? Right? So we get into a final clean. You go from here, and now you do the renovation or the restoration work, and you get to final clean. Final clean is there’s no construction dust. We’re well past. There’s no smoke and and and fire particulate there. At this point, there should be just construction dust that you’re dealing with. This is a normal house cleaning at this point. What do you deal with when you when you have stuff that you have to move around? So this was a personally asked about the garage. This is the same scenario. The house was completely burned. This is the house you were looking at before, and everything got moved into the detached garage. Guess what else needs a clean now? The detached garage for a bunch of contents that may or may not have needed to be moved over there, but the garage needs a clean now because now all this smoke contaminants on the concrete, and now it’s filling the room, the garage with with the smoke smell because everything got moved in there. So you got cross contamination. You got heat damage. Here’s how I want you guys to think about order balance theory. There used to be two theories. So there’s one that that the industry, I would say, is is generally been built on. Product driven order balance theory is that you come in and a homeowner smells a fire. And their odor is, hey. This house has a fire, and everything is covered in the soot. The odor balance theory is that if you have a bad odor, you’re gonna neutralize it by getting yourself a really clean odor. So imagine going into a fire, smelling smoke, and tomorrow you smell lemons. Wow. That smells clean. Now I was out at Costco with my wife a couple years ago. We walked into the detergent aisle. The sunlight bottle had fallen, and you smell that burst of that lemon. And I literally said, oh, that smells, and I knew what I was gonna say, so I finished it clean. But that’s a nice fragrance. So that is psychologically where we used to say, hey. That would be that would be good. That’s what they’ll think of us. They’ll think of us as lemons, and it’ll look like we’re doing something. K. Well, that’s order balances that when you have an offensive odor, you replace it with a with a clean and deodorized odor. And then you try to get yourself back to to neutral. Maybe maybe that’s a that’s a good theory. I don’t think that that’s the right theory. I think what you’re looking at is neutral and normal. You get to an offensive odor, and you work your way back. So you go to an offensive odor and you dilute it with fresh air. Okay. That works. So when we start looking at that, we’re now looking at our deodorization process. Well, if we went in here and we said, hey. We have that odor balance. We have an offensive odor. We remove the source. We still have an offensive odor, but it’s less. We clean it. Whatever is left now is a smaller odor. Remember when I did the the odor? Well, now we’re down to this. And so we’ve cleaned it, and now we’ve got a small odor. And we’re gonna try figuring out where it is, and then we’re gonna determine how we make it go away. And we have equipment that will make it go away, but we don’t need to hit hit it with a high volume of equipment. We can use small concentrated equipment to make that go away. So we focus on deodorization. And these are some of your options that you have. Thermal fogging, ULV fogging, oxidizers, pairing agents, and masking agents. And as you start to look at, you got your thermal fogging. So we’re gonna put a chemical in. We’re gonna heat it up, and we’re gonna try to recreate the conditions so that these thermal molecules, the molecules that we’ve heated up and vaporized down to a a small trying to repeat the exact same particular particle size to get it in. If we heat the materials up and the pore opens up, this odor counteractant can get in and neutralize our odor. That’s the theory behind using our our our thermal fogging. Is there anything wrong with that? No. Do you do it at the beginning? Not really. You should do it at the end because you’re taking the source out, cleaning, and then applying your thermal fog. You’re putting a liquid into that container, and then you’re superheating it. And you’re putting the fog in, and there’s some risk with it, but it’s an effective way to deal with odor. It’s more effective when you have a small amount of odor and you can concentrate your efforts on a very small amount of odor that you’re focused on. UOV fogging, in there, you’re taking a chemical, and we’re gonna spray a liquid form, and we’re gonna get in. Is it as good? It can be. The the the droplets are very small. They’re very microscopic. There’s theory that they can get into the surface, and then they they fill the pore, and they saturate your your your your particulate, you can fog it in the air, and and the liquid hits the it hits the smoke particle and encapsulates it in a polymer. The polymer dries and it drops it, and your smoke particulate is is covered in that. All of these have an effective use against against smoke. Do are they effective for your occupant? Will your occupant have an adverse reaction from it? But this is an effective tool, and it could be an effective tool in your toolbox. I’m not gonna I’m like, I won’t shit on any of these, but you have to understand that there’s literally a a detrimental effect that can come from anything you do in the house. Because now you’re adding a foreign substance to the the structure and the contents, and you’re responsible for the addition of that foreign substance. So oxidizers is a big one, and you’ve got bunch of selections here, ozone, hydroxyl, peroxide, chlorine dioxide, UV light. All of them have some kind of properties that will be effective against odors. Some odors more effective than others. Ozone’s probably our most powerful oxidizer that we have access to. Hydroxyl, I’d say, is probably, like, three to four times less powerful than ozone. It’s just a different way of of working and reacting. You got peroxide, which can be liquid or gas. You got hydro chlorine dioxide, liquid or gas, and you got UV light. When UV light is used in hospitals at times, and it it’s an effective tool. All of these, you have to understand, once you oxidize something, you can’t reverse it. So this is a small apply it lightly and go. What we’re we’re seeing is we’re seeing companies come in and just hammer jobs with oxidizers. Your oxidizer doesn’t just affect the smoke particulate. It affects the plastics, and it affects the paints and your cleaning chemicals. You don’t control where it goes and what it oxidizes. So this has no ability to reverse the effects of it. So once you do it, you’re now committed to you’ve oxidized something. If you’ve over oxidized it, you own the result. And I will tell you there’s multiple houses that have been replaced or sold or transferred to the insurance company because the oxidizer effectively damaged the building beyond repair. And so that will usually go to lawsuits. They settle before they get to court. So there’s no public record necessarily of the settlement, but the houses transferred due to the fact that the oxidizers can’t be reversed, and so the damage is permanent and long term. You’ve got masking agents. We just cover the set with another set, make it nice. And then you’ve got pairing agents where you come in and you apply a pairing agent like a respirator that uses the vapor cartridges, which is the essential oils. Those work very well. I’ve had good success with all of these. But it’s just pick the right tool and in the right quantity for what you’re trying to do. So those are your options. And what we do is you’re like, man, that’s like, where would I go? Here’s your other option. How about dilution? Just bring fresh air in. So there’s an argument to be made from a health and safety standpoint if we’re trying to reduce particulate count. Could I bring fresh air in, take the bad air out, pump it out on the other end of the building, or or or put it through a filter, but bring in fresh air and dilute the the contaminated air? Would that be a better option than all the junk we put in the air? Most of the time, probably. Do you have to condition it? If it’s cold and wet, yeah, you have to heat it and dry it, but it still may be better than your other option. So how much would you charge for an ozone machine versus how much do you charge for an air scrubber and a dehumidifier? So I could bring air into this office, have it circulate in, dehumidify it, and throw it out in back into the structure, and I could do that. If I want, I could come in and bring heated air in and bring outside air. Now I’ll use my particle counter, see what’s the contaminant level of the outside air. Do I need to filter it or not filter it? But I can dilute all the contaminated air with fresh air. I can still charge for it, but I don’t take the risk of it. There’s there’s less risk bringing fresh air in than there is applying another product to it. So maybe I buy more air scrubbers and I buy some heaters, and that’s how I’m gonna deal with fire damage. That’s a really effective solution. I think there was only, like, three or four percent of you that said you did that. You still would make similar money compared to the other stuff, but you don’t have the risk. So I like this as a primary option. And it would look something like this. Right? Reduce foreign chemicals and contaminants, and it’s an engineering control. So it’s a it’s a OHNS or OSHA requirement that we checked our particle count, and it was unsafe for workers. And we put a plan in place to reduce the particulate of bringing fresh air in, and we reduced the VOC concentrations that people would be exposed to, and it allowed us to remove the source clean. And guess what? When we got done, there was very little odor. Now we bring in our tools, and we say, tool is best for the job to get rid of the odor? Maybe it’s a contact spray on a certain material. Maybe it’s an oxidizing gas. We pick the the the solution that makes the most sense. And then this is gonna be the the controversial one is surface sealants. Surface sealants, the insurance carriers love to prescribe. Here’s how they get used inappropriately. So we’re looking at boards that were put in. So these were these weren’t engineered trusses, but what they did is they’re like, hey. You know what? Instead of cleaning these, let’s just spray a sealant on and then put our our temp boards in or or put a repair in place. You didn’t clean the wood. There’s still insulation that was blown in by the fire department’s hose. You sealed it. That’s not a proper coat. That’s a brush seal. And and if you read these sealants, almost all of them say that they need to be sprayed in to a certain thickness. Now if they say they can be brushed in, then they’re brushed into a certain thickness. I guarantee if I can see the wood, that’s not certain thickness that they’re supposed to be brushed to. So this is someone who doesn’t know the product, applies it to the job. Where would I expect to find some problems later on? Probably in these areas. Right? They just didn’t know how to apply the product. So when you see that as a consultant, if I see that on a job, I’m forced to come and challenge you on that. That’s what happens when you run into jobs like this. You’re like, hey. That’s inappropriately applied. You didn’t clean the surface. You didn’t apply the product properly. Like, if there’s a problem, you’re gonna be held responsible for it. How about this? We see this on jobs all the time. Uneven coverage. Probably on a dirty surface because I can see like, I can see debris, and it looks like the debris goes underneath the surfaces. Over here, we’ll just cover a giant hole with plastic, but you don’t have even coverage. You have a paintbrush with different coverages. That’s inappropriately applied. And then you’re gonna say, did you actually clean here, or did you just start spraying or painting the sealant on? Be careful, guys. That’s that’s the big one that gets a lot of people in trouble is this. Before we do that, you sealed part of the material. Where is that where is that odor going? It’s gonna go through the material on the other side. So you sealed the top. Did you seal the bottom? And if you do that, what did you do to the permeance value of the a material? When I say permeance value, I mean the ability for the moisture to transfer through the material. What did you do to it? You you changed it. So a piece of plywood would have a perm value of about ten molecules of moisture that would go through a one square foot area with one inch of mercury differential on the other side. It’s all technical. Doesn’t matter. Let’s just say there’s there’s a low pressure on one side, high pressure on the other, and it’s the equivalent of one inch of mercury. What we’re basically doing is we’re driving moisture molecules through the material. Could we drive an odor molecule through the material the same way? Maybe. Probably. So if you seal both sides and now all of a sudden you don’t have that same transfer of of water vapor, well, now you’ve sealed it in. And do you create extra problems like another vapor barrier where there shouldn’t be a vapor barrier in the building? Yep. So if you have a vapor barrier like in Canada here on we’re in a cold climate, our vapor barrier is on the in on the backside of the drywall wall of a vapor barrier, insulation, and then our our outside wall. In there, I would then be putting a vapor barrier on the outside wall where there shouldn’t be one. So I have vapor barrier, insulation, no vapor barrier, but now I seal the walls, and I put a vapor barrier in. What did I just create? I created an opportunity to condensate moisture inside the wall cavity. I’m the cause of mold and rot and everything else that comes with it. So yeah. Alright. Let’s go to questions. Then we’ll take another quick break, and then we’ll come back and finish this up. So do you have any experience or have an opinion on pure air? They say it’s better than ozone. Oxidizers are oxidizers. It’s an oxidizer. I like oxidizers. So, like, I love ozone. I is there something better than ozone? It works pretty good. It just oxidizes everything. So small applications, even even things that you wouldn’t consider. Let’s say you had a an odor that’s, like, in a in a in the bottom of a baseboard, plastic it off and hit it with ozone for a lot less time so you’re not, gassing the entire room. Product wise, like, brand name wise, not really. Like, I I like chlorine dioxide. Different manufacturers make it. There’s some that are better than others. It it’s an oxidizer. I like oxidizers, but you just not at the beginning of a job. Like, no way. That’s insane. And and now seeing the the legal liability and, like, the the homes getting replaced because people put hydroxyls in or or oxidizers in, no. No. I wouldn’t do it early. I would I would hold off. But for that particular brand, I don’t have a problem with that brand. So when is fogging technique applicable? It it it’s it’s a technique you’re gonna apply. So if you want to if you’re do if that’s your comfort, how would you say it? There there’s there’s things that would be if you were doing a wildfire and I’m gonna say this, and and and there’s, like, a million asterisk you’re gonna put beside it. But if you were doing a wildfire and you had an odor and you cleaned the building and you still had a light odor there, you could go in and hit it with a quick thermal fog and and if you you have a contaminant. So any of these solutions, like, when would you thermal fog? When I’m trying to get a gas into something. Do I wanna send it down a ventilation system? Not normally, but if if my project scope requires it, maybe that’s where we would use it. You could use it wherever you use oxidizers. It’s just your your it’s your weapon of choice. Just be careful with whatever you’re you’re playing around. It’s yeah. Is there an ideal situation for it? I don’t know. It it it kinda depends on what burned and then depends on how your cleaning process went. And then it depends on, like, where are you trying to get it into. So is it in a tile area where you, you know, you’ve got a little hard access and you’re gonna try that to see if it makes it go away? You just everything comes with risk. So it’s just you’re applying a product. Think of it like your weapon of choice. Is it does it work? Is it the right weapon? And don’t remember that once you put something in, you might limit yourself on other options you have that you have you can apply to the building after. So if you put a chemical in, can you oxidize it after, or are you gonna create more problems? So you it’s our marketing in the industry is like, hey. Have everything on your shelf? No. I’d have a very strategic plan of what I have on my shelf. Right? I would be I would be looking at the type of work I wanna do, and then I’d have people that are trained in those tools and and, you know, you just don’t go at it as hard. And, honestly, that’s how we used to do it. We were just, like, throw anything and everything. I would not do that today. Yeah. Great tip. If a kitchen is super greasy and it was that way pre loss, will the smell remain in the grease? So it’s a great question. If pre loss, it was a super greasy kitchen. So you you could say, like, a restaurant that was in between, like, in between cleanings when the ducts are getting cleaned. That particulate’s gonna bond with that grease. So your your smoke cleaning is like, hey. The grease that’s normally there has a particulate that’s not normally there. To get rid of the particulate not normally there, we have to clean the grease that is there. And so your your degree of difficulty for cleaning is gonna go way up. But you’re gonna have to remove it because that’s so in that seniors’ home, one of the things was we didn’t clean the duct in the kitchen, and we didn’t do a grease clean on it. And we had particulate that when the kitchen was not in use, the outside winds would backdraft the smell of smoke back into the building, and that kitchen ventilation system held copious amounts of the synthetic smoke smell. Right? So you had that. Absolutely. What are your thoughts on window treatments? Do you clean or replace? The adjusters tend to freak out when we give them a twenty k replacement quote. So so the so here’s the thing. Twenty k to replace, are they heat damage or smoke damage? So if they’re heat damage, life is what life is. You can’t change that. If it’s smoke damage, you now have up to twenty k to play with to save them. So if you’ve got the right technology to clean window treatments, have at her. And now you get to be creative because you’re not gonna do that on time and material. You might come in and say, hey. They’re worth twenty thousand dollars to replace. Do you wanna spend ten grand to for us to clean them? And you would do a test clean and see if it works. And if it works, then you go at it. So it’s a it’s a good option when they wig out on the replacement cost. Now you have a bigger budget to save them money. There’s there’s I like that question because there’s a whole there’s, like, a whole day of discussing how you use that type of how you use that type of of scenario to maximize your revenues and your profits and save the insurance carrier a ton of money. It’s like a win win for both. Good question. Do you wanna take one more, or do you wanna go to break? Let’s take one more, and then we’ll take a, a five minute break, and then we’ll and then we’ll come back and finish it up. Perfect. So what’s the most effective way to remove protein fire odor after cleaning all the surfaces? That’s well, so you’re if you’re still stuck with odor, you’re now trying to find out what you didn’t clean. So is it interstitial spaces? Is it behind cabinets? Is it inside electronics? Like, if you’ve cleaned every square inch of the building and you still have odors, you’re now left with where did you where are those odors hiding? Now it comes down to concentration. So let’s say you got ninety nine point nine percent of the odor, but there’s still an area where there’s some odor. Normally, it’s behind kitchen cabinets. Like, it’s in the voids in the cabinets or it’s in the porous materials of the cabinets. So you could try, hey. I think it’s in the trim. I think it’s in the exposed OSB. Maybe we seal that. It’s just a risk game. It’s like, I think I could seal it and make it go away, or maybe I have to sand it, or I have to replace it. And so what could you use? It’s normally the cleaning process. You could try you could try the like, a little bit like, an ozone’s not great on a greasy thing. You could try a thermal fog. A thermal fog might work with the right chemical. Yeah. And then and then but the big thing is, like, ninety percent of your ninety nine percent of your effort should be cleaning on that. Like, not a lot of order counteractants are gonna do a lot of good on the on the greasy stuff. So you’re gonna be left with elbow grease. And so you probably just missed something. Maybe the underside of a counter. Right? Like, that’s like, normally, we look at the horizontal surfaces, but in a, like, a really bad protein, everything’s covered in this stuff. So you’re just doing a real deal detailed clean. A lot of cleaners just overlook it and just do, like, as if they’re doing, like, a final clean. Totally different cleaning. This is where the insurance industry who’s untrained puts pressure on those that are trained, and then the degree of your knowledge is gonna impact what how we how we handle that. So I’m gonna show you some jobs. This one these jobs all went to a legal, litigation after. In here, this was a fire damage. And so this was a plaster wall, and then these walls were covered with this, plank. And in behind the plank was either a blown in or a bad insulation. And I got into a battle with an engineer on that the planks had to come off and the insulation had to be removed. And they said, no. The plaster was wet, but that doesn’t mean that the insulation got wet. And the engineer actually said, because I don’t see any water lines on the wood, means the water never got there. And that was a major battle, to have a discussion on, is this ready for rebuild? And the homeowner was like, what do you think? I’m like, well, if the plaster was wet and you have mold on the surfaces because the plaster was there, it’s just a conclusion that there’s gonna be water there, and no one tested. The restore never tested. So that project was basically left wet because they said, well, it’s a fire, and we didn’t put anything on because mold doesn’t grow on plaster. Nope. It might not, but it grows on the contaminants. It grows on the solid surfaces. It grows on the debris. It grows in the mold. Like, there are whole in the insulation. There’s a whole bunch of areas that will grow. Maybe it’ll have a harder time growing on plaster. Sure. But these are the discussions you’ll have with untrained individuals. That was the blown in insulation that was left behind, and this job was ready for rebuild. The insurance company had farmed this out to a rebuild contractor who took a three day fire damage course, and now they are ready to do fire construction rebuilds. I said, what’s your what’s your plan? And they’re like, oh, we’re just gonna put it back together. Maybe we’ll just sweep it up. No fire damage training. No fire damage tools. No mold training. No mold tools. And when we talk about it, you’ll see that temporary little splashes of sealant and then all of this, like, this is not ready to go. This is a dry ice blast that’s required for this. Like, you’re not gonna seal those contaminants. Their plan was to seal the the contaminants in place. There’s a little bit closer picture of it. That is unacceptable. That is not a proper fire restoration. Now I get the temporary repair because there was maybe some structure that was burned, but that’s not how it needs to stay, and they had to come back and correct that. In here, this was ready for paint. This was cleaned and ready for paint. I there was no cleaning, and that’s not ready for sealant or paint. Those walls need to be cleaned. Look at the floor here. Oh, let me go back. Look at the floor. That is debris from the demo. How is this cleaned? It hasn’t been cleaned. They haven’t removed the the byproducts of combustion. On the wall, you have the good old hand test to see if there’s what what type of soot and contaminants there are. You’ve got exposed electrical. How are we gonna deal with that? Is that getting replaced? Why is it still there if we’re gonna remove and replace it? You know what one of the driving factors was for the installation was that if there was a certain percentage of the home that got renoed, then they would have to go through permits and the electrical would need to be replaced. It wasn’t a decision based on the technical. It was based on a financial. So, technically, wet insulation with category three water needs to be removed, But from a financial cost, they didn’t wanna open the walls. That is original construction dust and debris demo. How is this building clean for fire? And you’re gonna see this all the time. Yeah. I know I know, Scott. Right? When when it will not grow, I give them the benefit of doubt. It’s like, okay. Mold won’t grow on the plaster because of maybe, like, the sort of the same thing as, like, on concrete. I don’t buy it, but we’re looking at this, and this is all exposed. In here, in this building, because of the age I walked through it, I was I was fully PPE ed up. I was like, I bet you there’s lead here. And so I ran lead tests, and I found lead paint in the cutoffs. So that meant that this was also now a lead exposure, and all this dust was lead contaminated dust or potentially lead contaminated dust. Worst project, but if this is gonna go to a general builder, and their people were gonna go and work in this. And I had to fight the insurance company tooth and nail. In the end, I lost that one. The insured gave up and just said, you know what? As long as they get us back to rebuild, I we’re just gonna go with it. You can’t you can’t win them all, but that one I knew we could win if they had the guts to keep going. It’s just they didn’t have the financial means to fight it. Well, I share this one with you. Occasionally, you get weird stuff, and sometimes you can’t step onto it alone. Now this is an extreme example. But for you as a restore, extreme might be different. Right? You might be doing small smoke damages, and then you get a total loss, and you’re like, oh, I don’t even know where to start. You get somebody with experience. So you get a consultant involved. This was a former student of mine who took the fire loss specialist training. Top notch restore, went to the job, and then was like sent me a text and was like, hey, Chris. I have this project. I’m not sure how to handle it. Do you have a couple minutes for me? And I was like, oh, yeah. I got a couple minutes. So he calls me, and he goes, Chris, and he how are you? I’m like, good. What are you dealing with? And he’s like, I’m in a two thousand square foot apartment. So my mind, I’m in, like, an apartment down the street. And he goes, I’m in the living room looking at an eighty million dollar Picasso. And I went, I now know why you’re calling. And he goes, hey. This is a a unique situation. I’m dealing with some ultra high net worth individuals. I’m like, yeah. The the the Picasso would tell me that. And what we started to do is we looked at what when you get in there, you get overwhelmed by value. Sometimes you just like, you weren’t expecting. Like, I was expecting the call where we’re going into a regular two thousand square foot apartment. He wasn’t expecting an eighty million dollar Picasso when it threw him off. So he called me, and we started working through it. It wasn’t just any billionaire’s fire. It was the penthouse of a very, very high end hotel and apartment block. It turned out there was a suspected Chinese spy. He was a fraudster. He’s a businessman for that the FBI were raiding. And in the middle of the raid, all of a sudden, there was a remote device that was detonated, and it burned all the evidence in the apartment. And then it resulted in substantial heat and smoke damage. And when we looked at it, it was this hotel. It took several hours for the fire to be extinguished. So it was a hot fire in that vent, but it had moved through the entire building. And at the time, they were using the elevators, and the elevators were working like pistons. And so the contaminants went from the top penthouse all the way to the restaurant on the first floor. And this gentleman was, had had had caused the fire and or or allegedly had caused the fire. And when we were looking at this apartment, everything in the apartment had value. The couches the couch was a three million dollar couch. The paintings and artwork were worth over a hundred and twenty million. The unit itself was valued at about thirty. And the adjuster blew my mind because he wanted to treat it like we were doing an IKEA furniture pack out where we move everything to the center of the room, stack it all on top of itself, wipe the walls, and move everything back, and we’ll just call that good. That adjuster had no comprehension for what we were dealing with, and I don’t know his experience whether he was doing, like, normal residential last week. And then today, they’re like, hey. Guess what? You stepped up into the big league. But to give you an idea of the value here, there’s about a hundred and thirty thousand ultra high net worth individuals in the USA. We were dealing with the top five hundred in this building. So, like, there’s no no horsing around. You you f around, you’re gonna find out they’re gonna tie you up in a lawyer. Like, they will spend a thousand or two thousand dollars an hour for one lawyer, and that’s nothing. That like, that will put you out of business. So when you’re dealing with extreme stuff that’s bigger than what you’re normally able to handle, be conscious that you might not be in in the ballpark. So when we did this, I was like, okay. This is a major risk because these people sue for fun, and I don’t have the funds to defend myself. You don’t have the funds to defend yourself. So we gotta do this one really tight. And so you protect yourselves that way. But when you look at it, you go, what are the risks? So any job you look at this, you say, is there a risk of bad press? I don’t care if it’s a billionaire’s job or you’re doing a job at the school down the street. Is there a risk of bad press? Is someone gonna get sick? So if you’re doing a hospital, a school, a day care, that press is high. A residential house, low. Right? Like, what’s the chances they’re gonna get there? But twenty kids makes for a good story. Be careful of press. Is there a legal responsibility or a legal risk? So we anything we do, we have contracts. You have a process of taking your job from start to finish. There’s a legal process that goes with that. In that legal process, you’re basically looking to see how susceptible or how willing is the other party willing to go down a legal process with you. Billionaires, like sport. A school, not so much. A resident, not normally. So where we normally do our work, there’s probably a lower legal threshold. But when you screw the job up, yeah, there’s a there’s a higher legal threshold for when you when you screw up. So you look at what’s the legal risk. Well, low if I follow my standard operating procedure. So I can eliminate repress liability. I can eliminate legal if I follow standard operating procedures. And then we look at our insurance policy limits. Are we gonna get paid on this? Do we have the coverage ourselves? And then are we working with an outside expert? So are we going with indoor, environmental, professional? Your price should reflect the degree of difficulty or the risk that you’re taking on. So you’re not gonna charge the same for that hotel as you would for doing a residential job. That hotel, you’re gonna up your rate because you’re taking on additional legal liability, plus your skill set to do the job is high. Would you do that same thing if you were doing, like, a hospital? Your rates are gonna be higher in a hospital than they are if you’re doing residential structures. So we look at all of that when we come up to determine our price, and then you look at what is the value of something. So the value of art, when you look at this, in that particular job, that eighty million dollar Picasso, this is a painting, and that’s a painting restored after the oxidization process. So oxidization is one of the biggest enemies to high end artwork. It will age it on an exponential level. What we do with a with an ozone machine in four hours, I think is the equivalent of, like, ten years of oxidization. I might be wrong on the four hours, but I know one of the settings on your ozone machine, whether it’s four, eight, twelve, or twenty four or four, eight, or twelve, one of those settings is the equivalent of ten years of oxidization. So you’re taking years off of there. But if you’re exposed to oxidizers from other structures or other residents, all of a sudden, you’re now taking years and years off of that that, that artwork. And when people use it in higher concentrations, you’re doing bigger damage. The caution is when you do normal restorations, not when you’re playing in this world, but when you do normal restoration, you’re also running that risk that you’re oxidizing things like paints and plastics and TVs and electronics and everything else. You’re taking life off of it. So you apply it with some discrimination on that. Now, normally, you wouldn’t bring contaminants into high pressure. So when we started to look at this, we said, hey. We have an eighty million dollar Picasso. Normally, we put the building under negative pressure. Today, we’re going positive pressure. We’re gonna make sure that we keep the contaminants out of this building because I don’t want the other restorers’ oxidizers damaging the art. And we did that. We put a plan in to bring in New York fresh air, run it through an air scrubber, run it through dehumidifier, and then put it back in the apartment as positive pressure. That was to reduce liability, reduce risk of the artwork till we could get it out. No restore is gonna touch that. That’s a special handling. And then what we did is we made sure that we had the in the customer onboard with that that program. Now what’s important about this is that every job you look at, whether it’s health care facility, dental office, or someone’s home, what are you running the risk of damaging, and are is the insured ready to accept that liability of you putting your processes in? We don’t normally have that conversation, so it’s a big risk. Alright. Last poll, and then we’re gonna wrap this up and go to the q and a. What do you guys do to stand out? You perform furniture restoration. You handle high end or high value artwork. You specialize in wine handling, specialize in oriental rugs, or you provide general restoration services. So the answers are coming in. We’re gonna make this poll pretty quick. If you guys can jam your answer in there quicker than than not. Here’s what’s interesting is as the answers are coming in, I’m seeing more going towards general restoration services. If you wanna make money in this business, your skill set of being able to do what others can’t do is gonna set you apart. And when you’re in an area where you’re sort of doing what everyone else does, you become a commodity. So you’re not a specialized expert. If you’re not a specialized expert, you’re gonna be struggling to find revenue and profitability. It’s just it’s just what happens. If you’re in the business of doing dentistry and there’s a million dentists there, you’re gonna be struggling to get the customer in and get the right number. But if you’re doing the orthodontics or the surgical work, you’re gonna be in a higher pays pay grade than everyone else. Same thing with restoration. If you deal with the low end insurance companies, you’re gonna be there. If you, yeah, you flip that out. Ninety one percent of you are doing general restoration services. So that probably means you’re doing pack out. Maybe you’re in the in the contents cleaning, but you’re not in the specialty cleaning. You’re not doing electronics. We have no one doing oriental rugs. Oh, sorry. We had one doing oriental rugs, three handle wine, four handle high high high end artwork. Guys, you’re you’re in the starting point of restoration if you’re gonna get into this. If you’re gonna go into contents, you wanna be the person that saves it. Who no one gives like, no one cares whether you save drywall. Everyone cares. Like, if you if you save my desk, I’m gonna love you. If you save my drywall, I could care less. So the money is in contents restoration or historical restoration or restoring yachts or being able to restore an aircraft after electrical fire. You’re gonna find more money in those specialty services than you will inside of the, inside the normal run of the mill restoration. And the only way you can get there is if you skill up. So I wanna talk to you guys about selling here, and this is just a little bit of bonus because this I think this is important, is if you start looking at specialty being able to do furniture, what items could you save or do you what type of jobs would you get into if you were, let’s say, a a hardwood specialist or a furniture specialist? You’re probably gonna get into those million dollar homes or those five million dollar homes or the ten million dollar homes because the adjuster is gonna have confidence that, yes, they might not call you on all the small water damages for two grand. But when there’s the thirty thousand dollar water damage plus we need this table restored and that table’s worth a hundred thousand dollars, you’re gonna be the one that they call. You don’t even have to perform the work. You just have to know enough to get it to the right sub trade. But that call will lead to more revenue and bigger revenue with more margin. Now for those of you that are hunters or outdoorsmen, the restoration of taxidermy like a head mount is maybe seven hundred dollars. If you don’t but that’s a hunt of a lifetime. So someone could’ve worked ten years to get that mount on their wall, and then all of a sudden, it’s damaged with fire. And you’re like, I’m not really sure what we’ll do. We’ll put chemical on it. I’ve watched technicians put weird stuff on the taxidermy and ruin it. And if you took it to a taxidermist or you built a relation with a taxidermist and said, hey. Do you do fire restoration? Yeah. There’s taxidermy that can repair an antler. They’ll do a a synthetic mold and get the antler to look exactly like it did before the fire. Paint it up. Do it all up. It’s gonna cost some money, but you can restore that. Do you think that you maybe earn that client in the future? Hundred percent. You’d now hold that client’s client now holds you in a different light. So you’re gonna be getting these wins, but I’ll tell you, no one really cares about your carpet and your drywall. They care about the things they own. Oriental rugs is another one. You don’t need to know a lot about them, but you need to be able to come in and identify, hey. I noticed you have this rug here. That’s a very beautiful rug. Where where did you get that from? Don’t make the assumption. Hey. I got it from you know, it it’s it’s an oriental rug that I I I end up getting or it’s a it’s a family heirloom. Okay. How long have you had it? What’s the value? I had one fire loss where we had they were Iranian Persian rugs, and there were seven of them. Not one of them was worth less than ten grand. Okay. If we didn’t know that, probably we rolled them and threw them out or rolled them and treat them rough. Instead, we got carpet specialty, and that job went amazing because we had seven Persian rugs that were dealt with, and we just said, are those Persian oriental? Other Persian. Okay. Cool. How much are they worth? Ten, ten, ten, thirty, eighty. Cool. We’ll deal with those. That’s where you become a specialist. You don’t have to be the one that knows how to restore it. You just need to know enough to get the right sub trade in and talk about it. So just focusing on having those relationships and then going and marketing that service, you’re now different than ninety three percent of the rest of the industry. The ones that are doing wine, if you’re in wine country like we are here, having a good wine consultant with you is probably pretty important when you’re going into a fire damage and there’s a million dollars of wine that is is exposed. This is another one. Number one, if you go into a house and you see a room or a hallway dedicated to artwork, you better stop and pay attention because that artwork normally has a value, and and usually it’s a monetary value, especially if you see it’s got a built in wall. So if you see on the wall that there’s a built in inset and it’s got lighting, that is something that is a prized possession. You should stop and ask questions. Joe Myers is great when he does this presentation because he’ll stop and be like, oh, that that piece of art looks fantastic there. Can you tell me the story behind it? And all of a sudden, you’re getting the story of the artwork, and they’re telling you, oh, this is the painter. Here’s the value. Perfect. That’s what I need to know. Who normally handles your artwork? Oh, normally, it’s done by this gallery. Okay. Perfect. Let’s call them up, and let’s get them to come in here and get it out of the way. We don’t need to deal with it. You just need to know enough so you look like the expert that can deal with it properly, or you can take control of it. And I saw one of you guys earlier said, hey. You’re the contractor. You make the call. Yeah. You do. And then you take control, you act as if you’re in control because you’re asking the right questions, and you’re handling the items with the right respect. So we did actually get a couple questions just surrounding the standards that we talk spoke about earlier in the webinar. So do the standards touch on heavy metal particulate from a fire loss? Do you know? So I’m gonna say the I I believe the wildfire standard does, and I don’t believe the the residential fire standard does, or it does not. There’s it’s in draft format, so it it hasn’t hit its final format. So I’m I’m gonna just say that considerations have been given that when you deal with something that you believe is a risk, you should call an IEP or have a hygienist come in and do testing. So in some cases, it does, but does it specifically call it out as a major risk? Heavy metals may fall more under a health and safety concern than it does a cleaning concern, but that’s probably a light answer. It it it probably doesn’t fully address the the the concern of heavy metals. That’s a good question. You can easily address it though as like, hey. We have a lithium ion battery that just burned. We’re gonna get tested for metals. That would be a reasonable step to take. I think that would be prudent. And your justification wouldn’t be for it could be for cleaning, but your primary justification is health and safety. So use your risk assessment as is there any potential exposure to heavy metals? And if the answer is yes, then we need to use an IEP to test. Perfect. During the smoke and fire mitigation process, workers are wearing proper PPEs and using the right equipment and site protection. Is there a clause in the ICRC standards now for removing affected contaminant materials under cat three? This is a common challenge from the insurance reviewer to scrub our estimate. Under cat three. So under cat three, a contaminated material must be removed, and you kinda got bounced around. So this is the s five hundred. So this is a water damage question, but, you have to bounce around. So you’re you’re saying that you have a material that’s contaminated, and then you could refer to the reference section in the back of the standard and say, in those materials, let let’s say drywall, contaminated three drywall needs to be removed, and they’ll make the argument, well, it’s dry. So we’re so we’re good. No. It doesn’t say in the standard that when cat three water dries, it’s now category one. And so you have to refer to your standard and do that, or you get an expert in to come and argue it. And, I’m so I did a couple videos. This this this kind of, this kind of where we’re going is there’s a lot of, bullshit in the industry that is outstanding where adjusters say one thing because they were told stuff or they learned stuff ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna have videos, coming out. So I did this. I did a test run. And if you look, like, there’s some videos, like, seven reasons why I stabilize a job. I’m creating some stuff that you guys will be able to go in and not be the ones to say it. I’ll say it for you, and then you can give it to the adjuster as an instructor that’s telling is is is saying exactly what is. So when you have this question like, hey. Category three water is dry is now category one. It is not category one. You can just send them a link to a video, and you don’t have to be the one getting into the battle. Oh, I’m hoping that works in a as a benefit to you guys. But regardless, we we gotta educate some of the other sides, so it’s just part of an education process. We’re getting real here at four thirteen. Okay. So this one actually just came in, so I’d like to get to it. So equipment left at fire jobs. So example, a dehu. What do you recommend for deodorizing them after? We had cases that the equipment odor lingers even after the cleaning. Yeah. So some of it is how you set up and, like, what equipment are you using? Are you using a desiccant or are you throwing an LGR in there? And if you throw in your LGR in there, you’re exposing it to some corrosive materials. You could consider doing a fresh air exchange depending on the on the so so the question about deodorizing is you got now particulate in your machine. So your goal should be is is maybe you’re setting up a clean room where you can process the air through filters coming into your clean room. So you’re getting a low particulate count, and you’re processing the moisture out of the air. Those are are valid techniques of, like, not just throwing your equipment into the contaminant because now you’ve got contaminated machine unless that’s the purpose of the machine, but you will watch it corrode. So you might want to build a clean room, put your dehumidifier in there, bring fresh air into the chamber through filters, either through a negative, air machine or, or an air filtration device, and then have the the processed air go into the building. It’s a different way of doing it, or you might use desiccants or you might use heaters. Right? You might use some different technology to to control the humidity in that contaminated environment as opposed to putting your equipment in the contaminated environment. So who is responsible for doing a risk assessment priority to do to do any restoration? The public adjuster, the insurance adjuster, or the restoration company? So it falls on your your duty of care is for you to protect your workers. So it’s it’s you as a restorer, are are responsible for doing the risk assessment, and then you’re responsible to do it every day. So you might have things like electrical. Right? So we have electrical that’s exposed to contaminants. How do we how do we reduce that exposure? Well, we could have it expected by electrician to say, yeah. It’s still good to use. That you know, you basically go through your assessment saying, okay. We got trip hazards, slip hazards. Can we eliminate them? Can we can we reduce them? Can we put engineering control in? We’ve got a high particle count. You’re the one doing it. And then anytime that you come up with an OSHA I’m gonna use OSHA for this example. But anytime you come up with an OSHA concern for health and site health and safety, you then have an engineering control. How can you reduce that health concern? So now you have justification. We put an air scrubber in because we had a respiratory concern. So we go back to the air scrubber is, like, that is the reason you would do it is we have a high part particle count. We have the readings. We have it printed or saved. Put our equipment in, and we we lower the the risk. That’s OSHA. And if you have to, then you call up OSHA and be like, hey. This is what we’re doing. Is that good? Of course, it’s good because you’re doing a respiratory protection control. That’s very good. And so then there’s your justification. But what we don’t do is most people don’t do the rest the risk assessment. Now public adjuster probably should do their own or the adjuster should do their own. They don’t. They’re just not trained for that. They may even have an exemption in Canada. I think we have an exemption for workers’ compensation that they don’t I don’t think adjusters qualify for it. So, like, they’re not even bound by those rules. I might be wrong, but, yeah, like, as a contractor, you’re responsible to to do the work and do the assessment every day and verify the site’s safe. You’re the primary contractor in charge, and you’re actually responsible for all the contractors on-site that are your subs. I’d like to circle back actually to Betsy’s question just before the break. Sure. She said, I’m wondering about total loss. Is there depreciation, say, on furniture category across the board? Also, we do packouts. I’m wondering if there is a system with boxes and storage. So is the industry mainly doing barcode system with a scan gun and thermal printers? Yeah. There there’s no like, there’s handwriting codes right now. There’s there’s no there’s no industry standard. It’s just who’s got the technology to do contents in the way you wanna do it. Like, there’s systems that work. 吃瓜不打烊 works great with a handwritten label put on. There’s barcode systems out there. There’s no standard there. For the like, your question, normally, it’s white boxes are clean, brown boxes are dirty so that it’s easy for you to see what needs to be cleaned, what has been cleaned. And then the other question about total loss, there might be depreciation if they cash settle. You can’t determine that because you don’t know the policy that they bought. So if they bought a actual cash value policy, then they get depreciated amounts. If they replace the item, there’s usually no depreciation. They get the the replacement plus tax. But if it’s if they decide to take the cash, then they get the depreciated amount. So that’s an adjuster homeowner question. But from a restore standpoint, if you believe that it’s gonna be a nonrestorable item, document it really well, get the label, try to get as much information as you can on those items so that it makes it easy for the homeowner to, to make their claim. So while packing out contents from a fire, is it best practice to have a vac contents first and then pack out? Yeah. So you could preclean contents. If you can reduce the contaminant load to your shop, that that’s that’s beneficial. Also, if you’re not able to get to it right away because something else comes in, you’re reducing the likelihood of of of that damage being coming permanent. So you’re reducing the contaminant on that item, which means your restorability should go up. What’s really good is if you do the preclean on the item, which, let’s say, it’s a HEPA vac or maybe it’s a wipe, and then it goes into a box, comes to the shop, and tomorrow or later that day, you can get at it, you’re gonna be able to have a higher save percentage than if items sit for a month and they sit in storage. It’s just the contaminant has less time to work on those items. So, yeah, you’d you’d have a higher the higher ability to save more as a general rule. I like that idea. Like, Is HEPA vac the preferred method of cleaning for wood framing and services? Tough one. Depends on the the it’s a good preclean. And then, you know, are you dealing with actual scorch on there? Is it sanding? Like, is it small damage? Is it big enough damage that you’re like, no. We’re bringing the ice blaster in, and we’re going to on it. You’ve got now emerging. You’ve got lasers coming into the market, which are great for small areas. I’m seeing some lasers that were great for large areas. Like, they’re starting to expand the pattern. It used to be, I’m gonna say, three inch circle. So there’s different lasers that are hitting the market. So your consumable cost is down, but your equipment cost is up. Things like that are starting to change it. But to to answer your question, it kinda depends on what you’re doing. Like, if it’s just settled like, let’s say it’s a garage and it’s settled particulate that hit the surface, I’m not blasting it. It’s not embedded on the surface. Do a HEPA vac and maybe you’re doing gonna do some kind of wipe, And it depends on your surface, but or it depends on what you’re dealing with. Yeah. So do you recommend when we have PEX pipes burnt and the adjusters refusing a repipe? Sorry. What do you recommend? Oh, I so, again, what it comes down to is is when you go back to that assessment, is it heat damaged or smoke damaged? Can it be reversed or cleaned? And then if you’re like, hey. Like, PEX is pretty durable, but if it’s heat damaged and so you’ve got scorching on it, then it’s like, no. That’s heat damage. Like, I can’t zero warranty coming from us. I can’t clean it. I can see a discoloration on it. If you do clean it, make sure you follow manufacturer’s recommendations for what type of cleaning you can do. But follow that process of every time you go into a job is, is it heat damaged or is it not? If it’s not heat damaged, is it smoke damaged or is it not? If it’s smoke damaged, can we clean it? And then should we clean it? So we could clean it, and there’s no risk to it. So then do it. If you can clean it, but you shouldn’t clean it because there’s a risk to it to your business, then you’re gonna be like, then we get a liability sign off or we don’t do it. But, yeah, with an adjuster saying, like, I’m not paying it, then it’s like, well, then you’re covering the warranty on it. And you would just write in writing that we’re not covering the warranty on any PEX lines, and you put it in writing. You send it to the the homeowner that we are not warranting any of the plumbing due to it being heat damaged. And in our opinion, it needs to be replaced. Your insurance company will will you know, you’ll have to deal with your insurance company or you send the adjuster a message being like, we’re not warrantying it. Is this something you plan on warranty? Most times when you ask them to put a warranty on stuff, they just they fold up. Right? They’re not gonna do it. You said no, and your business is an independent business. I don’t care if you’re on a program or not. You’re not warranting some somebody out there. Like, it’s a third party. It’d be like me telling you that it’s okay. You’re gonna leave that pipe in there, and don’t worry. And then you’re like, well, if it bursts, what’s gonna happen? Like, I don’t know. It’s for you to figure out. You’re saying replace it. We’re gonna replace it. And so then you just tell the homeowner. Homeowner is a decision maker. Don’t make it your problem. If their insurance company if they paid for shitty insurance and their insurance company doesn’t wanna do it, that’s between them and their insurance company. Don’t make it your problem. I’ll do whatever you want. You want me a bulldozer house? I will. Does that make sense? Like, it’s just sometimes we get wrapped up in their relationship, and we shouldn’t. Like, so it’s like a like a fighting couple. Let them do their thing. You’re not part of it. Just walk away. Yeah. Well, the so the h o r Right. I That’s and that’s exactly why your recommendation is just it. Right? I have to show you a laugh. It’s still going away. Just like a look. Just like a married couple fighting, sometimes you just let them deal with it with their lawyer. But that’s exactly it. You just you step back. You did what you’re supposed to do. You said, hey. This isn’t restorable. My professional opinion, not restorable. And and then let them figure it out between the two of them. The adjuster’s gonna literally have to come back with, like, some kind of explanation of why they know more than a restore. Thanks. I’m just I’m loving this chat. This is fantastic. Another question another question came in. What are your thoughts on involving a hygienist for a restaurant fire and smoke damage? Should this be done to transfer liability and agree on scope of work and standard for cleaning? Yeah. So so so commercial spaces. So so determining a hygienist involvement, in a residence, you’re talking to the owner. And they have visitors, but, like, they’re in control of their family, so you’re you explain the risks. Like, you know, there were some chemicals burned under the kitchen. I think we should get a hygienist for that. And that’s a discussion, and then it might go to the adjuster. On a commercial environment where you have people that are consuming food, it comes back to what is my what is the press gonna do if they got ahold of this? So what publicity would I get if this went sideways? I don’t want the publicity of a restaurant being having a bunch of people get sick or say they got sick because of us. So I would have a a hygienist involved where there’s food involved. So it becomes one of those ones like, is there a risk for for legal and press? If there is, get somebody else in to hold the bag and and pass it on to a hygienist. And the beautiful part is you get a hygienist in. Hygienist is gonna say, hey. I’m not qualified to to look at the at the ducting in the for the for the kitchen. That’s a health inspector. Cool. The health inspector comes in. Like, you don’t need to be the the the answers for everything. Just call the right people. So food related, deal with the health department and have them make the call, and you make sure you get them involved. Why? Because I guarantee the adjuster is not calling the health department to see if they have to do something that they don’t wanna pay for. You call them and be like, hey. I’m the one doing the work. How do I do this work properly? And have them involved. That’s your job. So I think maybe we’ll do one more question. I know people are eager to get off to, their Thanksgiving or whatever their plans are. Although we could listen to you all day, Chris. I feel like you’re so knowledgeable on all this. No. It’s awesome. Last question is, how can you push for dry ice blasting instead of particulate blasting? So it it depends on your reasoning. If you were to go let’s say that you’re and and particulate blasting, let’s say that you’re you’re talking, like, soda blast versus, like, soda versus dry ice. You could you could make the argument that the cleanup is less, so we’re not gonna have all the soda everywhere. Now soda is a a good system because the soda is absorbent for odor. So it’s in some ways, it’s better than dry ice. Like, from a fire standpoint, it might actually be a better solution and worth the extra cleaning. So you could maybe make the argument that, hey. You want dry ice over a soda is because the job’s gotta turn around faster. So you’re just gonna deal with the wood chunks that come off. The ice is blasted out. It dissipates, so it gasses out. You remove it. And now you’re just cleaning up wood chunks, and so it’s a faster cleanup. Whereas with soda, you’ve got a substantially bigger cleanup but lower cost of operation on it. Is there a right and wrong way? I like soda with the cleanup. My text didn’t, but I like it because I like the result of it. The dry ice, I also like because it’s they’re all good systems. Like, I like the laser too. Super expensive, but the laser has, like, no cleanup. Although you don’t know what gases your the plasma is creating, But laser has an effective place in there too if you control the gases, so then you have no cleanup. Or or maybe sorry. I’ll say no cleanup, but there’s not been any research. Like, not like I’ve gone back and checked for residues after, like, what did the plasma create, But you have less visible cleanup. You know what I mean? Like, it’s it’s it it gives you a good result without a lot of debris around. So you’re dealing with a gas then. Maybe you’re creating something different. I don’t think there’s been any research into it. But, yeah, it’s just a different approach. Justifying it just comes down to selling the reason why. Why are you doing it? What is the outcome? What’s the result? How is it gonna save the insurance company money? Or if it doesn’t save them money, how does it reduce the problems that the insured’s gonna come back and call you for more problems? Awesome. Thank you so much, Chris. Is so late. That’s that’s a long that’s a long session. Thanks for sticking around till the end. Absolutely. Well, we wanna thank everyone once again, and thank you again, Chris, for sharing your knowledge with us. Have a good one. Bye, guys. Bye.