Restoring Rafters Damaged by Fire in Your Farmington Attic

1/17/2020 (Permalink)

You Need Experts On The Job In Your Farmington Home. Call SERVPRO.

Fire Damage In Your Farmington Home Will Need SERVPROs Assistance

During a house fire in Farmington, firefighters often use hatchets and axes to open up sections of the roof. This helps them gain control of the fire more quickly, decreasing the amount of damage overall in the entire house. However, it also helps push smoke out through the attic, which can leave rafters coated in layers of soot. This soot becomes troublesome for several different reasons.

When firefighters do this to your Farmington residence, fire damage still occurs because their goal is extinguishing the fire as quickly as possible. The attic is not considered as part of the living space, and stored items often carry low priority. However, we want to mitigate all of the damage left behind after a fire, and this includes the unfinished wood rafters supporting your roof. Soot in the most isolated places can cause odors, and it can also hide the extent of damage wood sustains. Weakened wood can collapse under the weight of heavy snowfall, even after our building crew repairs the roof. 

After the roof is tarped and protected, we can start mitigating the damage by removing the soot from the rafters. Lighter deposits, like those found farther away from newly-made holes, usually come away from the surface of unfinished rafters and other frameworks with a stiff brush. We use a high-strength deodorizer to neutralize any remaining odors.

Smoke can cause damage in other ways than just physical deposits. Particles can burn the rafters just enough to cause damage when heated to extreme temperatures, but without them ever igniting anything. Doused by firefighters, these quickly cool off, but the damage remains. Finding out how much damage, however, is crucial to protecting your home’s roof. 

We use different methods, including wire brushing, to remove all of the charred wood, revealing undamaged wood again. Other methods used include blasting with baking soda or dry ice pellets, and also scraping and vacuuming simultaneously with small filtered hand devices. Many times, we use a combination of methods. Once we reach undamaged wood, we apply deodorizer mixed with duct sealer to protect the wood and keep odors from becoming a nuisance. A pigmented lacquer-type primer can be sprayed upon the exposed, raw wood lumber to contain the malodorous molecules.

SERVPRO of The Farmington Valley is always here to help families in Avon, Canton, and Collinsville after fire damage leaves their homes full of smoke deposits like soot and ashes. Call us at (860) 675-4500, 24/7, year-round, including weekends and holidays.

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