Water damage restoration, mold remediation and cleaning in Pompton Lakes, NJ

A person answers at any hour and a crew dispatches to your street, with the technician calling back with an arrival time.

Pompton Lakes is a borough in Passaic County, and the company serves North and Central New Jersey. Decades of DuPont munitions plant groundwater and vapor contamination affected hundreds of nearby homes. Locally recognized historic homes include the Bartholf Homestead, Ironworker's Cottage, a Queen Anne style home, a Second Empire building, the Schuyler House and the Van Ness House. Landmarks inside the borough include the Joe Louis Memorial, the Yellow Tavern historical marker site and Federal Hill, site of the Pompton Mutiny. This is a service area business. There is no storefront, no street address and no drop off point, so all work is performed at the property.

Water that has reached a lower level

Rivers converge near Pompton Lake, and recurring flooding has followed, most recently with Hurricane Irene. Water in a basement is assessed before anything is moved. Category and class are graded to the ANSI/IICRC S500 standard, because clean supply water, used water from an appliance, and water that has been in contact with ground or sewage are three different jobs with three different endings. Extraction follows the assessment. A carpet face can often be saved while the pad under it cannot, since a pad holds water long after the surface feels dry to a hand. A lower level also runs cooler and damper than the floors above it, so air movers are standard there.

Reading moisture instead of guessing

A moisture meter rather than a calendar decides when drying stops. Fixed monitoring points are set in the wet materials, the subfloor, the base of the walls and the framing where it can be reached, and those same points are read on each visit so the numbers line up from one day to the next. Structural drying is sized to the wet material, and it ends when the readings at those points come back to normal. A surface can feel dry while the layer beneath it still holds water, which is why a hand on a floor settles nothing. Every reading taken goes into the written record you keep.

Mold work under containment

Mold work runs under containment with HEPA filtration. The affected area is sealed off from the rooms that are still clean, air is filtered inside that enclosure, and the colonized material is cut out and bagged. Coating or spraying a colonized surface and leaving it in place does nothing for the growth inside the cavity. A wall cavity that stayed damp behind intact paint can hold growth that never shows on the finished face, so suspect cavities are opened and checked.

After removal the space is dried, and the result is written down so there is a record of what was found, what came out and what the readings were at the end. Drying matters as much as removal, because colonized material taken out of a cavity that is still wet simply leaves a wet cavity behind. A mold inspection can also be booked on its own when the trigger is an odor or a stain rather than a known leak, and the finding is written down either way.

Extraction and what comes out of the building

Extraction follows the assessment and starts at the lowest wet point, because water that is still standing is water that is still soaking into framing, baseboard and the bottom edge of drywall. Carpet is extracted in overlapping passes until the wand stops pulling water, and the pad underneath is lifted and checked directly. Wet pad is cut out and bagged, since a saturated pad is slower to dry than the carpet above it and holds odor.

Material that cannot be dried in place is separated from material that can. A swollen particleboard shelf, a soaked cardboard box and a stained ceiling tile are losses, while solid wood framing, a concrete slab and most drywall above the wet line will usually come back with air movement and dehumidification. Everything that is removed is listed, so the written record shows the wet line, what was cut, and the readings that led to cutting it.

Carpet, rug and upholstery cleaning

Carpet is cleaned by hot water extraction with the method matched to the fiber, and the fiber is identified before anything gets wet. Heated solution goes into the pile and comes straight back out with the soil, and stairs, edges and corners are worked by hand afterwards because no machine head sits flat on a stair tread. Drying time depends on the season and the carpet. In warm, dry weather most carpet is dry within hours, and in winter or humid weather thick or dense carpet can take up to 48 hours.

Upholstery is cleaned to its W, S, WS or X code, matched to the fabric, and is usually dry in about four to eight hours, longer in cold or humid weather. Rug dyes are tested in a spot nobody looks at before the rug is wet, because a cream ground with a deep red border is the combination most likely to bleed. A wool rug is dried fully before it goes back down. Air duct cleaning can be booked on the same visit as floor and fabric work.