Sarasota has a large community of medical facilities that treat every kind of illness you can think of. Many of these facilities house their patients at least on a temporary basis. Many times these patients have all of the comforts of home right in their rooms, much like a hotel would. Most of the time this is a good thing, but in some cases people forget the rules. One case of this is when people decide that sneaking a cigarette in their room won’t hurt anyone. In many cases it probably goes without incident or notice by anyone else. One instance when it became a problem was when a patient had a smoke in their room and then dumped the ashtray into the trashcan. This might not have been a problem but it was right before dinner and the cigarette sparked a fire. Because everyone was in the cafeteria the fire wasn’t noticed until the fire alarm went off. By this time smoke had filled the room along with the hallway and 4 other patient rooms. The fire department was called and showed up to put out the fire. They used water to douse the flames causing quite a bit of water damage to the drywall in several of the suites. The manager and his wife were told by their insurance adjuster to get a professional restoration company there as soon as they could. ServiceMaster SRQ got the call shortly after 8pm to come and deal with the fire and smoke damage. By 9pm we arrived with a crew of eight people to assess the situation and begin cleaning up the mess. The first thing  that had to be done was to get the patients moved to rooms on the other side of the facility. The people staying there were recovering from many different types of neurological surgeries and treatments. Due to their conditions they just couldn’t stay in the area as we worked. The first step we took was to remove all of the burnt materials and collected bedding so it could be washed by the staff. Next we had to remove the water from the flooring, so we brought in our flood pumpers and extracted it from the carpets. This was necessary even though the carpets were ruined by the smoke and soot. Carpet is a whole lot easier to carry when it’s dry and we didn’t want to track up the floors in the rest of the building. The next step was to vacuum and wash the soot off of the walls using a grease cutting agent detergent mixed with hot water. Wiping and folding is the process we use to remove best remove smoke damage and soot. Two hours after we arrived we were finally done cleaning the walls and contents of the rooms. It was time for us to fog the rooms with an oil based deodorizer, this is done to remove the soot smell in the air. Lastly we set our drying equipment to remove the water that had soaked into the walls. For the next couple of days we monitored the progress of the equipment while the staff prepared to prime and paint the walls when it was finished. Finally when the walls were finished we measured all of the effected areas, prepared our estimate for the insurance company, and told the managers to call us if they ever had another emergency. In all it took a week from the day we showed up to when they were able to place patients back in the rooms. ServiceMaster SRQ will work with you to get your business back running the way it should after fire and smoke damage. Call us today to start the process of getting back to business as usual.