“Safety first” sounds like a cliche, but it’s how we run our business.
When we show up to your home, we’re usually the first ones there after emergency services such as the fire department. Our job is to see your home in its worst state, so that we can help restore it to its best.
The trouble is that we don’t know what we’re walking into. We can’t tell until we’re inside whether the property is safe, and more importantly, whether or not it’s safe for you to be inside.
Is the water damage quickly leading to dangerous mould?
Has the work from the fire department disturbed any long standing asbestos?
Is there lead paint that could be treacherous during repairs?
The truth is that we don’t know, and it’s not the first thing that we can think about while we’re working. That’s why we need to treat every site that we enter as hazardous, both for our protection and for yours.
It also means that we take protection seriously. Throughout the pandemic we saw how important it was to wear the right mask, and what that could mean for protecting against hazards.
That’s why you won’t find a single N95 mask anywhere in our work. The N95 has utility as a respirator mask, but it needs to be fitted properly to the face in order to be effective, and even then it is only optimal under certain conditions.
Instead we rely on P100 respirators, which filter out 99.7% of airborne particles. These masks are specifically designed to protect against smoke, ash, mould, lead, and asbestos, which are the sort of hazards that we encounter daily. We ensure that all masks are properly fit tested, and we don’t take any chances with our team.
We recently went into an apartment building in Oshawa that had been through a home fire in one of the units. We were there as soon as the fire department left the premises, before any of the tenants had re-entered the space.
It was a disaster. While the fire did not spread throughout the whole building, the smoke certainly did, and we could tell from a first glance that we had a fair bit of remediation work ahead of us to get the building back into liveable condition.
When we began digging deeper, however, we realized there were problems that weren’t obvious that needed fixing. As an older building, there was a significant amount of asbestos that had now become airborne, and posed a serious hazard to anyone entering the premises.
We also tested the wall paint and saw that much of it was lead - popular at the time that the building was erected, but known to be a serious hazard today. We could not, as professionals, allow tenants into the building until our team had been able to properly address these issues.
Thankfully, being first on the scene and being well prepared meant that the next steps were able to happen quickly. We reported the full extent of the damage and subsequent issues to the adjuster, and were able to quickly get to work at remediating the asbestos, removing the lead paint, and restoring the property back to a safe and liveable condition.
By the time we finished restoration, the property was safe and secure for its residents, and we had eliminated the risks of environmental illness from the invisible dangers lurking in the walls and ceiling.
Our job isn’t just to repair property, but it’s to keep owners and residents safe while doing so. That safety starts with our team, and taking the proper protections to keep everyone shielded from danger.
Hire a restoration team that puts safety first, and that makes sure the job is done right. Your safety is our top priority, and we’ll never cut corners to put that at risk.
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