1. Share a little bit about your company – its background, location, etc.
We opened up our location in Bloomington\Peoria IL in February of 2019 we started out as a one man and a van type of office and have grown to 6 full time employees. We are a full-service restoration IICRC certified in Fire/Smoke, Water/ ASD, Mold, Trauma Crime scene. We also provide top notch reconstruction services.
2. When did you first get the call about the loss? How did you land this job? Did you have a prior relationship, referral, online search, etc?
Mid-October2023 We initially responded with donating air scrubbers and Hydroxyl generators to help with air quality and odor. We didn’t get to start cleaning till late October. We had done work with the City / Parks department before, during covid helping clean restrooms in the parks, so we had been on their vendor list. We did an initial assessment and gave them some recommendations at that point the city requested a bid for services to remove soot and odor from the “Cat House” we ultimately ended up winning the bid and completing the job.
3. Walk us thru the loss:
- What type of loss was it? How did it happen?
It was a Soot/ odor loss, a heating element had heated up some bedding material to the point of combustion and began to smolder. The soot was light in color but had a strong odor and was thick at the time of the fire. Filling the whole building - How much of the structure was affected?
Soot covered everything in the building although there was no significant fire damage the soot damage was widespread throughout the building including animal enclosures - Did this require mitigation? Rebuild? Contents?
We did complete a full soot and odor mitigation on the building there was some demo work and reconstruction and a few contents to process - How big was the crew working on the loss, especially in the days immediately after?
We had four crew members in the building cleaning we had to keep the crews small due to several safety factors for the animals and crew
4. What was the biggest challenge on this loss? What was the biggest win?
Although we were out of time point of covid restrictions the animals in the zoo, especially Tiger, were very susceptible to covid infections so we had to follow covid protocols set by the zoo staff, we also had to deal with 50’ ceiling and artificial rock making cleaning challenging. Being winter we had to also work around the weather cleaning animal enclosures when weather would permit the animal to be relocated to the outside portion of the enclosures. The products we cleared with also had to be safe around the animals in the building and had to be cleared with Zoo Staff. there were times we had to stop cleaning in the middle of a day due to an animal getting agitated because of our presents and the noises we were creating an example was vacuuming soot the monkeys would sometime begin to go crazy running around the enclosure and becoming very vocal when this would happen out crew would take a break and let them settle down and would restart once they were adjusted again Our biggest win was seeing the zoo reopen to the public and the zoo got its more popular attractions back
5. What is the biggest lesson your team learned, good or bad, on this loss?
We had to be extremely thorough as some areas took weeks to be able to clean due to weather or animal care issues, we might only have one short window to clean and enclosure and had to be fast and meticulous with our cleaning
6. How long did the restoration process take?
Start to finish it took 3-4 weeks there was a lot of postponed cleaning times due to weather and animal safety issues, but we work well with the zoo staff
7. How was communication with the carrier/adjuster throughout the process? How long did it take to get paid in full?
We dealt directly with the city on this the communication was excellent on both parts and we worked well together we would explain what we needed to do and explain the process, the zoo staff would then let us know if there were any safety concerns for the animals in the area, if there was we would rework the protocol and confirm it with the zoo staff
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