What to Do After a Fire or Flood

Now, flood can make your home look really unwelcoming. If you are a victim of a fire or flood, you will never like what you see in your home when the flood or fire is over. Dirt and all sorts would have been driven into the home by the flood and the whole place would be a mess.  Things even get worse if you have not been able to remove your valued properties from the home before the flood came; those valuable properties would have been damaged by the flood and the financial consequence itself can be emotionally wrecking. However, the least you can do after a fire/flood is to get the home cleaned so that life can continue. How exactly can you get this done? Some simple things you can do to remove the traces of fire/flood in your home will be looked into below.

Consider infection

When cleaning up after a flood or fire, you should think beyond the dirt and debris the flood had brought into the home; think of the possible infectious agents the flood would have brought along. It is therefore very important to get the home disinfected when carrying out cleanup after flooding. The disinfection will help to remove any dangerous organism that can lead to one form of infection or the other in the home. How can the disinfection be done? Very simple, just get the surface scrubbed using hot water to which heavy duty cleaner had been added. Use a solution of one-quarter of chlorine bleach in a gallon of water to wipe the whole surface and this will adequately kill all the germs in the home and make the place safe again.

Get rid of the mud

Mud is one of the things that can be brought into the home after a fire and/or flood. The mud must be removed without delay and it must be removed as aseptically as possible; this means it must be removed without such mud leading to one form of infection or the other in the home in the course of mud removal. Shovel will be the perfect tool to get rid of the mud. After this, wash off the left over mud from any of the hard surfaces in the home and the best tool for this is none other than a hose or garden sprayer.

Your insurer must know about it

Before you start with any of the cleaning methods described above, you must first call on your insurer. This is the time to make some claims and you will never have problem making such claims if it had been settled clearly while you were registering the insurance policy. Make sure you take pictures of the home and those of the items the flood or fire had damaged.  Make a list of the damages too and be ready to present them when demanded.  While doing this, you would be equally required to fill forms for insurance claims, income tax deductions and also fill a form for disaster assistance. If you follow the above points to the letter, you will never have problem managing flood disaster in your home.