Why Standing Water Is A Concern For your Home or Business.

5/11/2020 (Permalink)

Our SERVPRO Professionals Can Help to Remove Standing Water and Dry Your Home or Business Before Irreparable Damage Occurs

Following a flood or substantial water loss that could occur in your house, it is crucial to focus on removing standing water first. As much of a priority as this should be, many homeowners are ill-prepared for this mitigation step. To successfully achieve the removal of standing water in your home, it involves the union of sophisticated extraction tools and experienced restoration technicians. 

Water removal involves the use of multiple extraction tools in our inventory. Finding the right tool for a specific job is a determination made during the scoping of the work to get done. During this initial phase that precedes mitigation, our crew chief and project manager can work with the customer to determine pre-existing conditions, the extent of the damage, and the most efficient extraction and drying solutions available. 

What Are the Main Risks of Standing Water in My Home?  

Standing water is an underappreciated threat to your home. Pooling water, regardless of its depth, can have destructive effects unexposed materials, contents, and other susceptible items. Addressing standing water first can help too limited some of the damaging effects that could take place, including: 

Structural Weaknesses  

Overexposure to standing water over extended periods can lead to a weakening of construction materials in your home. It is essential to note which materials might be deteriorating and highly saturated after water exposure. Saturation can make materials much more massive, which tests the limitations of fasteners like drywall screws and nails.

Migration

The movement of water throughout your home after a water loss incident can be a challenge to identify adequately. Getting ahead of this migration is vital, as it can limit how many materials and contents in your home become exposed to damage.

Oversaturation

Much like heavier saturations can deteriorate materials like drywall, over saturation of materials like carpeting and wood flooring can lead to specific problems of their own. With prolonged exposure, water can penetrate the surface layer of carpeting, affecting both the padding underneath this layer and even penetrate the subflooring.

Excessive Demolition 

It is consistently a priority of our SERVPRO team to limit controlled demolition and later reconstruction of your damaged home. The fast response when the extraction is needed can help to mitigate the water loss event, and prevent unnecessary demolition when possible. 

How Can SERVPRO Remove Pooling Water?  

As briefly mentioned, the focus of our responding technicians is removing standing water from damaged areas of your home as soon as possible. Our team can go about this in several ways, and it varies based on the severity of the damage, the location of the standing water, and its depth. We have multiple tools to help in this regard, but the most commonly used are: 

• Submersible pumps
• Wet vacuums
• Squeegee wands 

What Happens to Water-Damaged Items in My House?  

Content management is another vital aspect of the immediate work that we can do when we arrive at a water damaged house. By assessing the water damage to your personal propertynv, we can make real-time drying decisions and recovery choices based on what these items need. In many situations, there are upwards of three primary categories the content recovery can fall into, including:

On-Site Relocation

Relocating items in a house to a safer area within the structure can be the most efficient method of protecting your belongings when no other damage is present. This solution is only suitable when no other physical damage is identifiable on the individual items.

Cleaning

Cleaning up individual belongings might seem like a tedious approach, but it can help to reduce out-of-pocket expenses for our customers. By drying and surface cleaning damaged items in the house, we can have items better prepared for replacement in the home following the completion of restoration and mitigation phases.

Off-Site Recovery 

In some situations, on-site recovery is not feasible. If more intricate cleaning and restoration are necessary, items can get relocated to our nearby SERVPRO facility for the attention they need. 

How Fast is Drying After Water Removal?  

While our team has much experience and training in drying sciences, there are too many variables to say with certainty how long drying processes typically take. We must determine where moisture exists and utilize our advanced tools to remove it from the house as quickly as possible. With equipment like high-velocity air movers and positive pressure systems, we can get you back in your home quickly after a loss incident. 

Water loss incidents can be a challenge to overcome, even for experienced restoration technicians like our SERVPRO of East Brownsville & South Padre Island professionals. Give us a call anytime that we can help with our sophisticated equipment and experienced technicians. We are ready 24/7 at (956) 747-3020.