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Copyright 1991 John De Armond  All rights reserved
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Fire! Part II

Foreword

I'm ready to graduate from writing magazine articles and start producing movies. Horror Movies. Our experience with the insurance company and with the contractors would fully qualify as a Spielburg special. It's now August 1st and we're still living in our LOVELY 2 room apartment. That's right, 4 months from the fire and we're still not back in the house. The insurance company's contractor (IRC Construction) was so bad that we had to fire him. This disturbed the adjustor's cozy arrangement so much that he's been "punishing" us by delaying allowing a new contractor to start work for about 6 weeks now. We're taking it to the lawyers (God help us!) this week. Wish us luck. We'll need it.

To top everything else off, we received a notice from Central Mutual this week telling us that they're canceling our coverage! In the last article I promised to make a recommendation regarding Central Mutual. Do I really need to say more?

What to do while the smoke clears

Last issue I covered the dirty details of our fire and some preventative steps that you can take to protect yourself from fire damage. This article discusses what to do if you have the misfortune of suffering a fire. What you do in the first 24 and 48 hours will have a vast influence on the ultimate outcome.

So you're standing around after the flames are out wondering what to do next. In my case, that involved getting some clothes on! The firemen, if they know what they're doing, will have smoke ejector fans set up to remove the remaining smoke from the building. This is a critical step in reducing smoke damage. Make sure your fire department is up on this relatively new technique.

You'll be rather numb and somewhat oblivious to the surroundings. In my case, I had rather severely cut my hand smashing a window and did not even realize it until a paramedic came over and offered to stop the bleeding! There will be a LOT of commotion. At the minimum, a number of firemen will be on the scene doing mop up. If you're on a traveled street or there were injuries, there will also be police and paramedics and the inevitable rubber-neckers. The firemen will want to do a report and if there is obviously a large financial loss or arson is suspected, the fire marshal will be there. You'll have to deal with these people immediately. I'd suggest you having a friend with you at all times because you'll likely not remember much about this time interval.

Unfortunately, by the time the smoke starts to clear, the vultures will also be on you like flies on a cow patty. There are some people in this world for which nothing is too low to attempt to make a buck on. I call them "bottom feeders" for the scum suckers they are. We'll discuss some of these later.

The first thing you need to do after the fire department leaves is to get away for a few minutes. Get a friend to drive you to a restaurant and enjoy some coffee. You need to collect yourself because the next few days are going to be hectic. You'll need all your faculties because it'll appear that the whole world is stacking against you.

After you have a chance to collect yourself, you need to buy a couple of survival items:

a) 	A camera
b)	A pocket tape recorder
c)	A portable cellphone (optional but almost indispensable)

The reason you're going to need the first 2 items is that you're entering in to the valley of the shadow of death known as insurance repair and you're going to want to be able to document EVERYTHING that happens. The insurance system, backed by billions of dollars of purchased politicians is incredibly stacked against you, the victim. Consider too that this only happens to you maybe once in your lifetime. Doing it to people is a daily routine for the insurance company. You can guess who has the advantage.

You'll need every tool at your disposal. If you talk to the adjuster, get it on tape. If you talk to the contractor, get it on tape. If you talk to the building inspector, get it on tape. Just slide that little recorder down in your pants pocket and let it run. The quality won't be tremendous but it will be intelligible. For the telephone, you can buy an inexpensive gadget at Radio Shack that will start your recorder whenever your phone is off hook. Get it. I've found a talking clock to be invaluable for time stamping phone recordings. Just push the button and let it speak to the phone before you hang up.

Truth is something that got burned up in the fire so don't rely on it being in abundance afterward. You're probably going to have to prove when and where commitments were made. I've talked to an amazing number of people who have had fires (just mention that you've had a fire in any given store and see who responds with a tale of their own.) ALL have had trouble with either the insurance company, the contractors, the building inspectors or all of them. One note of caution: Federal law says that it is permissible to record your own conversations both in person and on the phone. Some localities have silly rules restricting that right. You don't want to be a test case to prove federal pre-emption. Get a legal opinion regarding tape recording BEFORE the fire.

The second consideration is in the old saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words." You're going to be on a first name basis with the local 1 hour film processing lab. I think the one near me is ready to install a machine just for me! Document everything! Photograph every bit of damage from several angles. Photograph who is on the scene and when. An issue of the daily paper photographed in the background makes a good proof of date. If the contractor is doing something you think is wrong, photograph it! If you're lucky all you'll end up with is ...

Though I listed the cellphone as optional, I don't know if we'd have been able to do without it. I used a butt set clipped on the outside wires to forward our home and office phone to the cellphone. That at least let me stay in contact with people. It took several days to get the phones moved over to our temporary quarters and those days were critical for the recovery.

You've calmed down a bit, you've bought your equipment and now you're ready to begin. The first thing to do is call the insurance company. They generally like to know about these things up front. That done, you MUST begin the salvage operation immediately. Hopefully only a few hours have past since the fire was extinguished.

Before we look at salvage, let's consider some of the bottom feeders I mentioned above. By the time you return to the scene, the vultures should be out in force. I think it must be some kind of sixth sense that lets these creatures know practically before you do about your loss. Let's look at a few.

The Insurance Company Contractor: The adjuster will most likely have a contractor with whom he is cozy that he'll send out almost immediately. Before the afternoon was over, some contractor people showed up to nail boards over the 2 windows that were burned. I got charged $200 for that little job. Now this arrangement with the insurance company is very interesting. The insurance adjuster will want you to think that they'll handle everything and initially they do. A contractor and a smoke removal specialist show up on cue and only need you to sign an authorization to enter the property in order to solve all your problems. BUT! When things go sour, this same adjuster will try to slide out of the picture and claim that the problem is between you and your contractor and they are not a part of it.

Here are the facts. There are basically three ways of handling the restoration. A) you can let the insurance company do a turn-key job if they will. B) You can find your own contractor and with the insurance company's approval, have him do the job. C) or you can get estimates, agree on a price and have the insurance company cut you a check and you do the contracting and/or rebuilding yourself. The insurance company has a right to approve your work and may pay you in the form of several "draw" payments as you progress. You can earn yourself a lot of money doing the work yourself it you're up to the job.

The important thing to know is that YOU have the right to control what happens. You do NOT have to accept what the insurance company wants to do. In my case because I did not know any better, I allowed the insurance company's contractor start work without seeing any estimates or work plans. When I finally DID get to see the estimate shortly before we fired the contractor, it varied vastly from what we had been told and from the actual work performed.

Smoke Removal/Deodorizer Contractors: These are the people who try to salvage your belongings and remove the smoke odor from them. In my case, these people (Serve-Pro) have been very nice and seem to have done a good job. Nonetheless I've heard enough horror stories about other contractors that I need to discuss them. These people are typically also called out by your adjuster. The ideal situation is where they come in, load all your belongings up in a moving van, take them to a facility and clean and de-odorize them. If you have replacement value insurance (and everybody reading this does by now, right?) you either accept the cleaned article or it is replaced.

You can have several problems. The first is that many cleaning jobs are subcontracted out and often the subcontractors are careless. In one instance, the subcontractor laundry washed the flag that draped the coffin of my wife's father. Instead of it being red, white and blue with a bit of soot, it now is red, pink and blue with a bit of soot. If you or your spouse has the time, you should get involved in the decision loop during the cleaning. Go to the facility and make the decisions on your clothes and other irreplaceables.

There is another major problem that will crop up if you hit the limit of your contents coverage. As you probably know, your homeowner's policy is in several parts, the major ones being structural and contents. "Contents" covers everything except rebuilding the actual structure. The smoke removal contractor's fees come from your contents coverage. If you're underinsured such that your loss exceeds your coverage, you'll find that the contractor's fees take up a LARGE chunk of that coverage. They charge LARGE fees. If you have the time, you're likely to be better off cleaning as much of your stuff as you can. Instead of letting them come in and pack you out in a moving van, you can select the things you want cleaned. An honest contractor will give you the odds of cleanup on various materials. We found that we could do much better in cleaning cloth and clothes than they did. They probably do a better job on wood and hard surfaces. Most of them don't make you pay for things that don't clean up but the things that DO clean up are expensive enough that you need to consider it. We were rather significantly underinsured on contents and are seeing a large chunk of our contents coverage go to the contractor.

Mortgage Holder: We've not had any problems in this area but I've read and heard of enough problems to mention it. The mortgage holder has an interest in your insurance settlement. Indeed, the check to the contractor is typically made out to require 3 signatures, yours, your mortgage holder and the contractor. Most mortgage holders do little more than inspect and approve the reconstruction work. However the bottom feeder companies can make your life miserable. The reason is that many mortgages have provisions whereby something like a fire gives them the right to call the mortgage due -- just as if you'd defaulted on payments -- and grab the insurance money to pay it off. They typically then invite you to finance the repair with a more expensive second mortgage. The people most often hit with this sleeze are those who have an old, low interest mortgage whose rate is significantly below market.

This is a case where you really must investigate things before the fire. If you find that you are at risk, perhaps you can refinance your house with a mortgage company that does not reserve the right to call the note after an insured disaster. I can't give a lot of good advice on this one because I've not had the problem and because banking is another one of those areas where we have the best laws banking money can buy. I just want to make you aware of the potential for problems.

Public Adjusters: These creatures are most interesting. Like lawyers, they feed on others' disasters. Yet like lawyers, they may be a necessity. The public adjuster for a fee, typically 7% of what you collect from the insurance company, represents you to the insurance company. Hopefully what he brings to the table is as much knowledge of insurance procedures and law as the adjuster has and thus can argue your side more effectively.

If you have the rare pleasure of dealing with a reputable insurance adjuster, you'd be pouring money down the drain in hiring a public adjuster. I really can't tell you how public adjusters can help because I've not heard anything good about them. The ones that have telephone solicited me have been so grossly offensive that I've not allowed the conversation to go beyond my firing my anti-phone-solicitor device (a freon-powered boat horn) at people.

Misc. Phone Slime: You'll find that you'll be deluged with phone solicitors of all kinds after your fire. Everything from ambulance chaser lawyers to contractors to used furniture salesmen. I've found 3 items to be invaluable. First is the answering machine. It really helps when you want to get some sleep. Second is the aforementioned freon boat horn. Third is Caller-ID if you can get it from the phone company. Caller-ID is a service that sends the caller's number to a box you connect to your phone line. The number is transmitted via modem tones between the first and second ring. It allows you to see who's calling BEFORE you pick up the phone. I have a box with several memories. After I discharge my anti-phone-solicitor device and hang up, I get the calling party's phone number from the Caller-ID box and call them 10 or 15 or 20 times, depending on how motivated I am, to verify and reverify that they will NEVER call me again. It helps to ask for managers and company officials. Letting your modem's fingers do the walking is also effective, though you have to be careful of the FCC's rules against harassing daemon dialing.

Dealing with a Contractor

Probably the most critical step in reconstruction is selecting your rebuilding contractor. Fire restoration is a specialized business that requires skills and equipment not normally available to regular new construction contractors. Unfortunately, because the profits are so high, fire restoration attracts more than its share of bottom feeders.

The first thing to realize is that you do NOT have to use the insurance company contractor if you don't want to. You have the right to choose your own contractor and unless your contractor's unit prices are out of line, the insurance company must approve. On the downside, you do accept some of the risk of choosing your own contractor. If he screws up, your insurance company might suggest that you dig into your pockets to make up the difference. My opinion is that you are probably better off finding your own contractor despite the added risk. If you choose to accept the insurance company's contractor, at least check his references and closely scrutinize his estimate before allowing work to begin.

There are 2 ways that fire restoration contractors work. One is simply to provide a fixed price quote on the job. Some insurance companies will even allow that. I've heard of people literally taking ocean cruises and returning to a rebuilt house. I don't recommend this even if the insurance company will allow it. The second way is for the contractor to come in and do a detailed room by room damage assessment and work up a bid based on his standard "unit prices." For example, a room may have 600 square feet of floor covering. The contractor's unit price might be $0.45 per square foot to remove the old and $15 per square foot to replace it. The total price is simply the sum of all these unit prices times the units involved.

In our case, the contractor would not give us a copy of the unit price bid. We had to extract it from the insurance company. After looking at it, I can understand why. Some unit prices will make you whistle! I realized that I was in the wrong business! Computers don't pay nearly so well. About the only way you can find out what is typical is to have several contractors bid on the job and compare unit costs. Price is less of a concern than completeness since the insurance company is paying the tab. It was a revelation to us when we finally got our hands on the unit cost bid to see the difference between what we'd been promised and what had been quoted. It is vital that you get every excruciating detail defined in a contract BEFORE work starts. The few days' delay up front will be more than paid back in the end. Don't underestimate the degree of detail needed either. We found ourselves arguing at one point over whether to replace some $10 doorknobs. Never underestimate the pettiness of a contractor or an adjuster when money is involved.

I'm going to cover dealing with the contractor more extensively in the next article but I want to stress now that you must always stay on top of the contractors. An important point often missed is that you MUST have specified in the contract who the contractors responsible manager is. You should demand reports from this manager as often as necessary. I paid at least one and usually two visits to the site each day and spent over an hour during each visit. I grilled the manager-of-the-day about the work in progress. I took pictures of the work on a daily basis. If we end up in court, this documentation and attention to detail will prove invaluable. Last but not least, keep a log book and record all events as they happen. A bound and numbered journal record is best but a spiral notebook will do in a pinch.

Salvage Operations

As I mentioned in Part I, most of my damage was done by smoke and steam. Much could have been averted had I known then what I know now. We foolishly waited from Friday until Monday to start salvage in the mistaken belief that we had to wait for the adjuster to make an appearance. In our case, he could not bother working a bit of overtime on Friday so the office sat for 2 days. By Monday the damage was done.

Before you can do much salvage, you're going to need power. The utility is called by the fire department and removes your meter so you won't have commercial power. You'll need to get temporary power. If you're lucky enough to live in an area where the local electric utility sets construction poles, you can call them and have a construction pole set near your house. Unfortunately, that's not the way it works in Cobb County Georgia. We're on an electric Co-op, Cobb EMC. EMC does not set poles. EMC also had that attitude that makes you hate bureaucracies. You know, the "it was not my house so why should I care?" attitude.

I had to have the pole fabricated by a contractor and set, had to arrange for the electrical inspector to look at it and then pray for a dry day to get it connected. EMC does not work when it's raining. The bottom line is that it took me a week to get a temporary pole turned on. This means that your temporary power is probably going to come from a generator. Here again I had to learn the hard way. I'd always had an old army surplus generator around of one sort or another but I'd never had to buy a commercial generator. I figured that since we had 2 refrigerators, a freezer, lighting and some power tools to run, a 4KW unit would be about right. This size is popular with contractors because it will run most power tools and compressors.

In my first attempt, I got a "contractor model" Coleman 4KW generator. I figured it was a good brand name so I could not go wrong. I was mistaken. It was equipped with a Briggs and Stratton lawnmower-type engine. This antique design engine was loud enough to be heard in the next county, drained it's small one gallon "contractor's tank" in about an hour and used oil about as fast. After a day of bone-jarring noise, I dragged it back to the generator store, took the 15% restock hit and bought a Yamaha. Prime example of why the Japanese are kicking our butts in manufacturing. This unit is whisper quiet, starts easily enough that my wife can pull it, runs 24 hours on 5 gallons of gas, uses no oil, has a low oil cutoff, has an economizer that throttles the engine back when there is no load, and provides 10 amps of 12 VDC for battery charging. A little after-the-fact research has led me to discover ... makes a generator too but its engine looks like a clone of the Briggs & Stratton. I suspect it makes as much noise.

We learned the fine art of load management. Example: When the refrigerator tries to start, one must shut off several lights. And one must shut off all lights in order to run the air compressor. Makes one really appreciate the local utility. One tip. If you must run your refrigerator from a generator and/or run it from a long cord, visit your friendly refrigeration supply house and get an appropriately sized "hard start kit" and install it on the compressor. This kit contains a capacitor and a thermistor and gives the compressor extra starting torque when starting against low voltage. I had several of these on hand and installed them immediately after getting the generator.

Lighting is another issue that you must address. You cannot imagine how black a soot encrusted room is even in broad daylight. Plus for the first couple of days, you'll be working around the clock. We developed a couple of innovative solutions. In the main area of my office where the most salvage work had to be done, we strung up "used car lot" lights. You can see these lights in last issue's pictures. These are regular lamp sockets that contain piercing pins on the base. You simply lay the conductors in the grooves and tighten down a nut to install them. I ran a couple of strands of 10 gauge wire around in a large horse-shoe and attached a light about every 2 feet. One hundred watt bulbs provided enough light to work.

The second solution addressed the need for portable area illumination. I built a number of light stands, each of which consists consist of a 500 watt quartz-halogen outdoor reflector light that screws into a 3 way conduit pull box (hole in top, bottom and rear.) A cord feedthru screws in the back hole and a 6 ft piece of pipe screws in the other. The other end of the pipe screws into a flange that bolts to an 18" square plywood foot. This gives you a nice, bright and portable light source that only costs about $15 to make. We deployed these lights all over the house to aid in the salvage of the residential part.

The principle damage mechanisms are corrosion and solution. Electronic components are particularly sensitive to the hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids in the smoke residue. We saw cases where the gold plated legs of ICs were literally eaten in two. Disk drives and tools literally corroded before our eyes.

The best procedure for things that could stand it was to soak the item in a strong detergent, high pressure rinse it and forced-air dry it. Most all electronics that can be opened to expose the circuit boards can withstand this treatment. You'll need at a minimum, a rain suit, some rubber gloves and rubber boots. You'll find that you cannot get the smoke odor out of your skin if you don't protect yourself. The detergent is strong enough to damage the skin too.

Since we had so much equipment, we set up an assembly line. I bought a gasoline-powered high pressure washer and one of the construction heaters that looks kind of like a jet engine and runs on propane. A few pieces of particle-board made a makeshift rack that we could stack cleaned items on and direct the hot air from the heater onto. The drill is to disassemble the item, soak it well in detergent, let it soak, high pressure rinse it, and immediately dry it. An air compressor survived the fire and I used it with a blow gun to remove excess water before the drying cycle.

There are a couple of relatively new products that will revolutionize your life especially after a fire. These are high powered cordless drills and "sheetrock screws." Bosch makes about the best deal in drills. It comes in a kit with a quick charger and a spare battery for about $120. Mine is the combined drill and screwdriver and has an adjustable torque clutch for driving screws.

"Sheetrock screws" can be considered to be nails with threads and a phillips head top. They are available in lengths from about 3/4" to over 4 inches in either black oxide or galvanized. The thread angle is very steep so only a few turns are needed even on the longest screw. You can get phillips head bits for your drill that contain specially ridged points that tightly grip the screw. The combination of the cordless drill and these screws has obsoleted nails around my place. You can drive these things as fast as you can hammer nails but without all the violence. You can almost instantly whip up shelves and racks that are more sturdy than nailed assemblies. Since you don't have to pound them in, you can set up angles that are practically impossible with nails. I've literally used pounds of these things during the salvage operation.

We experimented with several detergents and the one we found to do the best job by a large margin is called "Purple Stuff." It is distributed in the Atlanta area by Northern Hydraulic. NH also sells mail order so you could get it there. Check a _Popular Science_ issue for an ad. Purple Stuff's action against smoke residue is something to be seen. What it does to unprotected hands is also something to be seen!

For PC computer boards and similar items that did not contain potentiometers or other non-hermetic parts, we simply dunked them in buckets of water until we could clean them. We found that they survived better than if they had been allowed to sit in the air.

Disk drives are particularly vulnerable. We screwed up the worst by delaying cleaning some of the drives. I'm not sure that "cleaning" is the correct word. More accurately, we did not recover the data before corrosion caused them to fail completely. Were we to have it to do over, we'd concentrate on the disk drives as the absolute first priority. I'd buy a PC and tape backup even at retail if necessary.

For books and paper records, I'd suggest consulting an expert. Your library or your smoke removal contractor can recommend experts. We found that for most books that are in print, it is cheaper to toss the old ones and buy new than it is to salvage the old ones. As a lover of books, you cannot imagine how I wanted to cry to see perhaps a thousand books in the dumpster. There are some amazing techniques available for irreplaceable and/or rare books and records. You'll pay amazing fees for such services so my best advice is to protect your paper from fire beforehand.

Anything steel must get immediate attention. Knives, tools, guns and other such items fall into this category. My guns rusted literally before they were cool even though they were protected from flame and heat. The smoke and steam did it. One technique I used saved a number of tools and steel stock in my shop. I filled a garden sprayer with a 50-50 mix of motor oil and kerosene and literally hosed everything down with it. I opened drawers in tool boxes and drenched everything. I walked down storage shelves and drenched everything. Not only did this treatment stop corrosion in its tracks, it seemed to make cleanup easier by dissolving the smoke film.

Documenting your Loss

This is the most miserable part. The best way to document your loss is to document it before the fire. We all know that we should use a cam-corder and video tape every item in every room of our house and office but few of us do it. I did on my last house but not this one. My advice is to do it and put the tape in a safety deposit box and keep the tape current.

Documenting after the fact is messy and time consuming. It must be done ... finally developed a system that worked fairly well. We first had a friend with a cam-corder make a quick video pass through each room. This tape provides gross details and gives a feel for what the post-fire scene is like that still pictures just cannot do.

Our main documentation tools were the pocket tape recorder and the camera. In each room, we'd take a detailed picture of an area and then dictate a description of each item to the tape recorder. Provide price and any other relevant details as necessary. After all the taping and photography was finished, we sat down and transcribed the information into an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is keyed to the pictures. Fortunately for us, most items even in the main fire area were not burned so badly as to not be recognizable. If the fire had not been contained as fast as it was, we'd have been in a fix. The spreadsheet let us label each item as to commercial or personal and easily calculate a total.

Resources

I'm running out of space but before I end, I want to mention one resource you will want to take advantage of if you have a fire. It is a magazine- book titled "The Homeowner's Guide to Insurance Repair." This guide is normally provided by the contractor at his cost. You can also buy it from the publisher, phone 801 373 2222 ex 3636. This book is heavily slanted toward the contractor, so much so that some parts must be labeled propaganda. Nonetheless, there are enough good facts to merit getting a copy. The publishers claim to have some influence over subscribing contractors, though I've not yet investigated.

Summary

*	Don't rush things immediately after the fire.   Take some time to
collect your thoughts.

*	Salvage your delicate electronics and mechanical items immediately.

*	Try to get a handle on your total loss before you choose a course
of action.  What you do regarding your structure and your contents
will vary greatly depending on whether you hit your limits of coverage
or not.

*	Be prepared to document your loss in excruciating detail.

*	Nail down everything in writing before allowing any work to commence.

*	Keep a sense of humor.  You'll need it.

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Disaster By Fire: Part 1 of 4
Disaster By Fire: Part 3 of 4