The Water is Dry...Now What?

8/1/2018 (Permalink)

This photo is from a home that experienced flooding. You can see our technicians has remove floorboards, baseboards and sheetrock.

When a home or business experiences floods, leaky pipes, or sewer backups, drying up the water is only half the battle in a recovery story.

As part of the drying process, the SERVPRO team often has to do a bit of deconstruction to properly find and dry all of the water.

Depending on the amount and type of water and how long it sat, our technicians may need to remove things like wet carpet pad, floorboards, baseboards and even sheetrock. This is to ensure all the water damaged materials have been removed and that mold can’t grow on any materials left behind.

For example, our team recently handled a major water loss at a Green Bay area home. The water line to a refrigerator broke, flooding several rooms on the first floor of the home and even seeping into much of the basement. The owners were on vacation when this happened, so the water sat for almost a week.

Because of the extensive damage, our team had to pull up carpeting, remove some wooden floorboards and cut out several inches of sheetrock, among several other steps.  Fans and commercial dehumidifiers then dried the remaining structural components back to pre loss condition.

Now, the water is gone and the structure is dried out but the story is not over.

Our reconstruction project manager now steps in to put the home or business back together.  It is a process called reconstruction. It is up to the reconstruction project manager to figure out what needs to be done and put an estimate together. Insurance also plays a big part at this stage (as you might expect!).

The adjuster and our project manager will negotiate on the estimates along with the home owner.

Once everyone is in agreement on coverage and the scope of reconstruction, it is up to our reconstruction project manager to schedule the work and make sure our team gets that work done ASAP.

The ultimate goal is for SERVPRO of West Brown County to make that flood seem “like it never even happened,” bringing that story to a happy ending.

If you need our help with a water loss and reconstruction, you can call us any time at 920-434-8224.