STOP Restoration Fort Worth not only protects your property from further damage during a flood or other water damage, but we also protect your health. The manual that professional restoration companies should be using to govern how to handle water losses is the S500, which is published by the IICRC. As a professional restoration company and National franchise holding many certifications from the IICRC, we are obligated to follow the water mitigation guidelines outlined in the S500. One of the guidelines we adhere to during the water mitigation process is to make every effort to maintain air quality during the process of drying out the property - both for the safety of our crews and for the properties occupants.
During the drying process, our technicians are required to take steps to dry the property as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, many of these practices can have a detrimental effect on indoor air quality. Some of the practices include the following:
- Cutting openings into walls
- Can allow significant amounts of fine particulates from sheetrock, dust and fiberglass from insulation to escape into the air.
- Lifting carpet and padding
- Releases significant amounts of dust and other particulates into the air that were previously trapped beneath the carpet and padding
- Removing wood flooring
- Releases significant amounts of dust, saw dust and other particulates
- Deploying high velocity air movers
- Blows everything and anything that is in the property including dust, insulation dander etc. all around the property
- Pressurizing wall / ceiling cavities with dehumidified air
- Essentially ejects significant amounts of particulate matter that was trapped behind the walls and ceilings for years into the living space
At STOP Restoration, the way we mitigate these air quality and health hazards has a tremendously positive impact on the occupants' quality of life. We implement things like the following:
- Containment areas that restrict the ability of contaminants to move from room to room, trapping them where they can be filtered
- HEPA air scrubbers that will filter the air of all particulates as small as 0.3 microns (that’s really small). Our air scrubbers will filter all of the air in a room or rooms 6-10 times per hour, every hour that they are running
- Our technicians wear respirators with HEPA filter cartridges on them (when necessary)
At STOP Restoration, here in Dallas Fort Worth, we take your health and safety very seriously. Call us today for your mold, fire or flood problem at 682-222-1009
The question becomes, "how do you manage contain and control the dispersion of all of this airborne particulate matter?" Our IICRC certified technicians take several steps to mitigate the impact to air quality, we can deploy air scrubbers which are essentially HEPA filtered air movers that filter the air in the affected area several times an hour. We can install containment zones which will trap the particulate in a specific area preventing the spread of the particulate to the entire property and if the particulate cannot be avoided we utilize state of the art 3M respirators designed to filter out 99.3% or more of the particles in the air. Remember, at STOP Restoration, our number one responsibility is to the health and safety of our clients and our employees.
