Fire & smoke damage · 24/7 board-up
Emergency board-up, soot and smoke removal, odor neutralization, contents cleaning and full reconstruction — including the water damage the fire service leaves behind.
People expect the burning. What surprises most property owners is that a fire loss is really three overlapping losses, and they run on different clocks.
There is the fire damage itself — charring and structural damage in the area of origin. There is smoke and soot damage, which reaches far beyond the burned area, is chemically corrosive, and continues etching metal, glass and finishes for as long as it sits. And there is water damage from suppression, which soaks the structure and starts the same 24-to-48-hour mold clock as any other water loss. Handling one and neglecting the others is the most common way fire recovery goes wrong.
Do not clean soot yourself. It is the single most common well-intentioned mistake after a fire. Wiping soot with a cloth drives the particles deep into porous surfaces, turning something a professional could have cleaned into something that has to be replaced. Leave it, ventilate if it is safe to do so, and photograph everything.
We photograph and inventory everything from the first visit and keep written records of the scope of work, so you have a complete account of what was found, what was removed and why. What you do with that record is up to you.
Do not re-enter until the fire service has declared the structure safe. Once cleared, get the property secured straight away — board-up and roof tarping stop weather, animals and trespassers turning a fire loss into a bigger one. Do not attempt to clean soot yourself; wiping it drives particles into porous surfaces and turns a cleanable wall into a repaintable one.
Because smoke travels as a fine particulate carried on air currents, and it penetrates porous material throughout the structure — carpet, upholstery, drywall, insulation, and the inside of the HVAC ductwork, which then redistributes it. That is why odor neutralization is a separate specialism from cleaning and why deodorizing a single room does not work.
Many can. Textiles, clothing and soft furnishings often respond well to specialist cleaning such as ozone or hydroxyl treatment. Hard non-porous items usually clean up. Heavily charred porous items generally cannot. We inventory and photograph everything before it moves, so what is salvageable and what is a total loss is documented rather than argued about later.
Because putting the fire out takes a great deal of water, and it goes everywhere — through floors, into wall cavities, into the stories below. Almost every fire loss is also a water loss, and the water side has to be dried on the same urgent timeline as any other, or you add mold to the fire damage within days.
Emergency board-up and stabilization happen within hours. Cleaning, soot removal and deodorization typically run days to weeks depending on severity. Full reconstruction of a significantly damaged structure runs months. We will give you a realistic staged timeline at the start rather than an optimistic single number.
Board-up and stabilization stop a bad situation getting worse. We dispatch 24 hours a day across San Antonio and Bexar County.
(844) 476-1017