Water damage restoration, mold remediation and cleaning in Harrison, NJ

The town is shifting from a manufacturing center to residential and service sector uses, so the useful question on a call from Harrison is what is on your floor and what is under it, rather than what the town is like.

Harrison was incorporated in 1840 and was once called the beehive of industry, with RCA and Otis Elevator among the plants that ran here, and during the Second World War over 90,000 workers commuted into a town of about 14,000 residents. The Harrison Waterfront Development Plan covers 275 acres, about 35 percent of the town, and the rebuilt PATH station anchors that redevelopment. Water work in a town of mixed uses is quoted on the building in front of the technician: the material that got wet, how long it sat, and what the meter reads behind the baseboard.

Below grade carpet is the surface most at risk

Below grade carpet is the surface most at risk in a wet year, because the pad holds water long after the face has dried. A palm on the pile tells you almost nothing once the face fibers have given up their water to the room air. The pad underneath is a sponge sitting against a cold slab, and it will stay near saturation for days while the surface reads dry to the touch. So the pad and the subfloor are read with a moisture meter at marked points, not judged by feel. Clean water caught in the first day or two usually comes back with extraction, a new pad and structured drying. Water that stood longer usually does not.

Stairs and old treads are hand work

Older stock brings staircases built before any machine made for them existed, so those treads are worked by hand either way. A flight of stairs has three faces per step, the tread, the riser and the nose, and no machine head sits flat on any of them. That matters in a water loss as well as a cleaning: water poured down a stairwell runs to the back of each tread and into the joint where the tread meets the riser, then into the stringer and the wall cavity beside it. Readings are taken at the bottom of the stringer and at the first floor landing, because that is where the water collects and stops moving.

Category, class, then extraction

Category and class are assessed to the ANSI IICRC S500 standard before anything is moved. Category describes the water, from clean supply water through gray water to category 3, which carries sewage or long standing contamination. Class describes how much material is wet and how hard it will be to dry. Those two answers decide what is saved, what is cut out and how much equipment the building needs.

Extraction follows the assessment and drying follows extraction, in that order. Pulling water out mechanically removes far more of it than any blower will ever evaporate, and every gallon lifted early is a gallon the air movers and dehumidifiers do not have to chase. Carpet is lifted, the pad is taken out when it is beyond saving, and the slab or subfloor underneath is extracted directly.

A meter rather than a calendar

Structural drying is sized to the wet material and stops when the readings at the fixed monitoring points come back to normal. That is a meter reading rather than a fixed number of days. Points are marked on the wall and the floor at the first visit, and the same points are read on every return, so the numbers can be compared against each other and against a dry part of the same material.

Concrete and masonry release water slowly, and a wall cavity holds it longer than the room air suggests. Equipment stays until the readings say the assembly is dry, not until a week has passed. Carpet itself dries within hours in warm, dry weather, while thick or dense carpet in winter or humid weather can take up to 48 hours.

Mold work and what you keep

Mold follows water that was left long enough. Growth needs a wet organic material and time, so a pad that sat damp against a slab or paper faced drywall behind a baseboard is where it starts. Mold work runs under containment with HEPA filtration, the colonized material comes out, the space is dried, and the result is written down.

A written estimate comes before any work begins, with no hidden fees, and the drying file with its named monitoring points and dated readings is what the customer keeps afterward. A person answers at any hour and a crew dispatches to your street, with the technician calling back with an arrival time.