Archive FIRE.03: file fire.03, part 1/1, size 26889 bytes:
------------------------------ Cut here ------------------------------
lines   words   bytes   file
512     4574    26632   fire03.txt

Copyright 1991 John De Armond   All Rights Reserved
This article first appeared in Midnight Engineering Magazine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Office Fire Part 3 - Salvage & Reconstruction

Hallelujah

I am poised on the brink of a celebration! As I sit here writing this article at the beginning of the last week in September, at long last I'm only a week away from moving back in my home and office. For those of you just joining in, waaaaay back in April I had a fire that destroyed my home and my business. For the last couple of issues I've been chronicling my adventures suffered while trying to get my house rebuilt all the while dodging sleazy contractors and insurance adjuster sharks.

Let's take a quick capsule look at the sequence of events to refresh your memory.

April 12 Fire (I blew the date in my first article!) The fire started in my basement office and destroyed it and part of our living area.

April 15 Insurance company, Insurance Company's Contractor and smoke removal contractors appear.

April 23 We vacate the house, having completed an around- the-clock salvage operation. We turn the house over to the contractor who promises to send in an army of workers to quickly rebuild.

June 13 We run the insurance company's contractor off the job. In almost 2 months he has done little more than remove the burn damage and has caused almost a thousand dollars worth of additional damage (broken stained glass lamps and the like. We have a replacement contractor of our own ready to go to work.

August 29 The adjuster for Central Mutual has refused to authorize our contractor or any other to continue work. In my opinion, he is punishing us for firing "his" contractor. We hire a lawyer.

Sept. 9 Amazing what an attorney can do. Our replacement contractor goes to work. He spends most of the first week undoing what the first contractor did wrong.

So here we are. My contractor (B&G Construction of Cherokee County for those readers in the Atlanta area who suffer a fire) is doing a fantastic job. Jim Garth, the owner, has been able to maneuver around every land mine the insurance company has lobbed and at the same time has really pushed the schedule trying to get us back in our house in the shortest time possible. Last Friday my front yard looked like a parking lot for a ball game! He had the HVAC, the electrical, the wall paper, and the carpet contractors plus several of his own men all at work at the same time. My office and lab is going to be much nicer than it was before the fire though unfortunately, far less populated with equipment thanks to my being underinsured.

Salvage Operations

In the last issue our illustrious publisher, Mr. Bill ran out of space and had to split out the part of my article on salvage operations. It turned out to be a very good thing because in the interim I've learned a lot more about the do and don'ts of salvage.

What you do in the first few hours will profoundly affect what you are able to salvage. We learned a lot of lessons via the school of hard knocks - a fine institution from which I hold numerous advanced degrees. After you've had that cup of coffee (remember the cup of coffee I mentioned in the last article?) and have collected your wits to some degree it is time to go to work. Literally every minute counts.

This salvage discussion assumes you've had a fire but that the fire was extinguished fairly rapidly such that the fire damage is confined to only part of the facility. In populated areas and with small buildings such as homes, this is likely to be the case. The fire departments in most large cities are very good. Therefore as I mentioned in Part I, most of the damage is done by smoke and steam. In my particular case 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 our place sat for 2 days. By Monday the damage was done.

While the scene is still hot and smoky you MUST remove any delicate items and/or items that are prone to chemical attack. The by-products of combustion are highly hydroscopic and highly corrosive so the damage begins as soon as smoke coated items cool enough to attract moisture. BEFORE the fire you should make at least a mental note of where your valuables are located in your facility. Your fireproof safe(s), your computers, your firearms and vital records are examples that come to mind. If you're present during the fire, find the fire chief and tell him where delicate items such as fire safes are located. They'll concentrate on keeping fire away from them and will get 'em out long before you'll be able to enter the structure.

Light 'er up, Mac.

Before you can do much salvage, you're going to need power and lights. 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 ... 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 its 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 that you can't go wrong with either a Yamaha or Honda generator. Kawasaki makes a generator 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 the pictures in Part I. These are sockets for regular screw-in lamps that contain piercing pins in the base and a clamping nut. To install them, you simply lay the conductors in the grooves and tighten down the 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 feedthrough 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.

To distribute power around the house I built two power distribution boxes, one for upstairs and one for the office. Each consists of four ordinary outlet boxes bolted to a piece of 2X4. A length of 10-2 with ground house wire connects this assembly to a plug. I connected the wire as if it were a 240 volt connection; i.e., 240 volts across the legs with the ground wire as neutral. Alternate outlet boxes were connected between alternate sides of the line and neutral. Box one went to leg one, box two goes to leg two, box three goes back to leg one and so on. This is a miniature version of how your home breaker box is connected. The advantage of this arrangement is that 240 volts is available if you need it simply by connecting between the hot blades of two adjacent outlets. On the generator end the connectors are ordinary 240 volt plugs that mate to the 240 volt connector on the generator. A similar set of connectors attached to the temporary power box when you get it makes transitioning from generator to utility power painless. In the temporary power box, I connected each cord to a 50 amp 240 volt breaker. Yep, it's a bit too much amperage for the rating of 10 gauge wire but this wire is outside and is temporary power.

Why would you need 240 volts? Consider the easy example of your electric clothes dryer. You drag the smoking hulk from the fire, clean it up a bit and then you have to make a decision. Do you toss it and let insurance replace it or do you try to clean it up and salvage it? The first thing you need to do is figure out whether it works. So you take a "Jesus cord" - a wire with a plug on one end and alligator clips on the other and so named because that's what you yell when the clips accidentally short - and wire it up right there in the yard. If it runs you clean it up, if not, in the dumpster it goes. In case you think this looks somewhat like the triage procedure used in emergency rooms, it is. You have to make the quick decision on each possession to save or trash it based on little information. You separate possessions into obviously dead (to the dumpster), probably going to die (probably also to the dumpster) and salvageable.

This arrangement with power boxes and lighting has been one of the best things we've done. They've been used throughout the salvage and reconstruction. It provides reliable power to construction workers - a rare commodity. The excellent lighting enables the workers to do better work. And when Cobb Flicker'n'Flame (Cobb EMC) does its daily power dump, all we have to do is pull 2 plugs and stick 'em in the generator to get the crews back up and working.

Lastly, buy a LOT of extension cords. Don't waste your money on el cheapo cords. Get the good 12 or 14 gauge contractor's cords in at least 50 foot lengths. Remember that at 500 watts each, the light stands I mention above build load rapidly.

Combating Corrosion

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. This stuff MUST be removed with all possible haste.

The best procedure we found for things that could withstand the process 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 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 ...

There are a couple of relatively new products that will revolutionize your life especially after a fire. These are high powered cordless drills and "drywall 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. This is the best thing since sliced bread! I don't remember what a screw driver looks like. I'd probably have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome if I'd had to manually screw all the screws that have been manipulated since the fire.

"Drywall 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. They self-drill in wood and thin metal. 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 "Super Clean, That Purple Stuff." It is distributed in the Atlanta area by Northern Hydraulic. NH also sells mail order so you could get it there. Purple Stuff's action against smoke residue is something to be seen. What it does to unprotected hands is also something to be seen! A quick look at the ingredients shows that it resembles whitewall cleaner so if you can't get Purple Stuff, something like Blechwhite will do.

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. Indeed one of the lessons learned from this experience is that a complete PC equipped with sufficient expansion cards to access any drive in use should be stored off-site. Don't forget the tape drive(s) too. Off-site backups alone are not what they're cracked up to be. Hardware is cheap. Data is not.

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 attempt salvage. 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 metal 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. Remember that the detergent in motor oil does just what you'd think it would do - dissolves crud.

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 actually 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. Then mark your calendar to update the tape at least once a year.

Documenting after the fact is messy and time consuming. It must be done not only for insurance but for the IRS. We tried several methods and 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. We then followed up with an item-by-item cataloging session.

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. Resist at all costs falling into the old "gosh I don't need to describe that item - I'll remember it" trap. After you handle perhaps 5,000 articles in one day, your memory is filled with mush. Treat each item as if you'd never seen it before.

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.

Smoke and Odor Removal

After you've removed the immediately threatening smoke residue there still remains the task of getting rid of the smoke odor and the stains. Purple Stuff will get rid of a lot of stains. For items that can stand it, a quick dunk in bleach will remove many stains. Instead of buying gallons of bleach, mix your own. Buy dry chlorine for your swimming pool in the "shock" concentration. "Sockit" is Olin's brand name. At our local membership warehouse I can buy 12 lbs of chlorine for about seven dollars. Simply dissolve the chlorine in water to make a saturated solution. This mix is several times stronger than household bleach. For real cleaning power, combine this solution with Tri Sodium Phosphate, available at your paint store. The cleaning power of this mix is something to behold and is second only to its harshness.

CAUTION: Dry chlorine in powder form in contact with most organics will cause them to spontaneously catch fire. This is a real FIRE HAZARD! Try a tablespoon of Sockit and brake fluid mixed outdoors and on a non-flammable surface to see the fire starting ability of this stuff. It will even react with Coke! Treat this stuff with respect.

Odor removal is an art unto itself. Much of the salvaged office ... when one opens the door is now as strong as the day we packed it. The same holds true for the structure. One of the first things my contractor did was open the walls up and remove the insulation. The smoke odor was stifling even after several months. Removing smoke odor is a coordinated process that involves cleaning, sealing and chemical treatments.

Sealing involves painting all surfaces that can tolerate it with a barrier paint. The brand that every contractor around here that I've talked to uses is called "Kilz". It looks like heavy oil-based paint but will cover almost anything. I saw it seal sheetrock that was soaked in oil from an exploding oil can. It does an amazing job of sealing in odor and stain. All floor, ceiling and wall joists were heavily coated with Kilz before replacing the sheetrock, paneling, flooring and so on.

The chemical treatments involve the use of substances that attack odor molecules. It generally involves first spraying structural components with a solution ("wet fogging") and then filling the structure with a dry mist generated by a powered atomizer ("dry fogging".) My contractor is taking the additional step of filling closed spaces such as inside the walls with an odor absorber from Zep Chemicals. This granular substance is designed to be used in such problem areas as dumpsters. The chemical mixes are generally proprietary and the vendors are somewhat closed mouthed about it. I'm exercising my legal rights and requesting the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) on the chemicals being used in my house so I'll know more later.

There are 2 big players in the odor removal game in my area. ServePro (the bright green vans with the red lettering) and Zep Chemicals. ServePro employs its own staff. They have done an excellent job on our possessions but they charge an "excellent" price! I can highly recommend them. Zep sells chemicals mainly to the building maintenance and sanitation markets. They have a line of odor removing chemicals. Most of the contractors I've talked to use the Zep product line. As I write this article, the odor removal process in my house is not yet complete but what they've done so far has worked well. I'm going to be experimenting with techniques using these chemicals to deodorize my office contents. I'll report on progress.

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.

*       Stay on top of the reconstruction job on a daily basis.
I can't imagine our job getting done on a timely basis
without my being there.

*       Retain an insurance specializing lawyer as soon as you
can.  If you have no problems with your insurance company or
contractor, you're lucky.  Getting legal advice far before
intervention is necessary is money well spent.

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

Products mentioned:

Purple Stuff - Distributed by Bultje Sales & Service Inc.
Liberty, South Carolina, 29657 (803) 843 6278

Northern Hydraulics - PO Box 1499, Burnsville, MN 55337 (800) 533
5545

Kilz -  Your local paint or hardware store.  We get ours from
theHome Depot.

Zep Chemicals - ZEP Manufacturing Co.  Division of National
Services Industries Inc., Atlanta, GA 30301