What to Do After a Storm Hits Your Area
The storm is gone, but it certainly left behind a mess and damage to your property. As long as everyone is safe and in good health, you can start focusing on how to repair your home or commercial property recover. After storms rip through your neighborhood, your home or building may have contamination from the diseases in flood water, there may be serious damage to your roof or structural elements of the property, or there may be many more potential sources of danger.
Staying safe often involves calling remediation professionals within the San Francisco Bay area in order to repair the property and resolve safety issues. Here are the basics of what you need to do after a storm in order to stay safe.
Understand Floodwater Dangers
Arming yourself with knowledge is always a good idea. After major storms, you may experience flooding, but few people understand the real dangers of this. Floodwater can mix with run-off, sewage, and just people’s things and bring all the contaminants from them to your home. Anything that touches floodwater should be considered an unsafe thing to touch and especially unsafe to prepare food on. You can take steps to sterilize everything the floodwater touched. Those things that can’t be sterilized, unfortunately, need to be disposed of.
Avoid Electrical Equipment
After a storm, if your property has suffered any water damage, your electrical equipment may be compromised. That includes computers and complicated electronics but also things as simple as lights. If the power is out or the lights are compromised, use flashlights. Be extra careful when you’re moving through a building with only a flashlight, as it may be harder to notice safety hazards.
Call the Professionals to Assess
Serious damage to the roof, walls, or flooring may all make your property unsafe to walk through. If it has been a while since the flood or storm began, mold and mildew may have already started to grow. And, unless you have a functional carbon monoxide detector, you may put yourself at risk of carbon monoxide poisoning in any building which has a gas-fueled appliance.
There are many hazards in buildings that have suffered significant storm damage, so how do you predict them? Ultimately, it is safer to get professionals to assess buildings that have major damage. Even when the water damage appears to be minor, there is a lot of value in asking the professionals to assess your property. We can tell you what needs to be done not just to remediate the damage but to prevent more from happening in the very short term.
Stay Safe Outside
Most likely, when your home or job site needs remediation, you will need to be somewhere else that is safe while the work is being performed. Often local hotels or shelters are opened to offer people a safe place to stay. While you’re travelling to a safe place:
● Avoid power lines
● Avoid stray and wild animals
● Use insect repellant
● Wear long sleeves and pants
● Source water and food carefully
Trust West Coast Fire & Water
We can help you assess and remediate the storm damage that your property has suffered. We serve the San Francisco Bay area for any kind of storm damage and can help repair your property. Call our experts today at 415-499-9000.