Mold Damage Experts in Oak Ridge Talk About Issues Resulting From Water Leaks

6/24/2018 (Permalink)

Pipe breaks or leaks can happen quietly and cause damage for a long time before they are discovered. Call SERVPRO right away to remediate.

Team SERVPRO Technicians Understand the Spread of Mold Through Your Home

If a pipe breaks inside your Oak Ridge mobile home while you are out of town, it is possible that you will come home to a big mess. When water sprays into your home for a long time, it can affect everything inside your house including both building materials and your possessions. As time goes on, excessive moisture can cause microbial growth to occur on organic substances inside the building. The longer the water damage problem goes unnoticed, the worse the contamination can get.
 
Once a fungus develops it forms structures called hyphae that spread into, across and up out of materials producing spores that act as seeds. When mitigating mold damage in Oak Ridge, preventing spores from spreading to unaffected areas is essential. As the seed-like, microscopic particles float around in the air, they find places to settle and produce more fungal contamination. Microbes can get into the building's ventilation system causing air quality issues to arise.
 
Since mold can cause health effects with some people, containing spores to the originally affected area is our SERVPRO technicians' primary goal. To start, anywhere inside the home that got contaminated by fungi gets sealed off from the rest of the house. We set up a containment chamber using thick plastic sheeting and metal poles. The chamber traps in any spores and dust created by the mitigation process. We then set up an air scrubber that gets attached to the side of the contained area to suck in the air cleaning it with a HEPA filtration system.
 
The HEPA filter traps the tiniest of particles floating around in the air so that only clean air is exhausted out by the air scrubber. Anti-microbial solutions also get used during the process to kill mold and the spores created by it. The major focus of the mitigation process is to remove the contamination from all affected materials. Some fungi can be sanded off surfaces while our SERVPRO restoration crew uses a HEPA vacuum to suck up the dust created by the sanding process. In other cases, the contamination is so severe that affected items must be thrown away. When removing objects from the contained region, they are always carried out of the containment chamber in sealed plastic bags so that contaminated dust cannot escape into the unaffected environment.
 
After all contamination is removed, our SERVPRO technicians dry out structural components so that the fungi do not reappear. If you ever have to deal with remediating fungal issues inside your mobile home, call SERVPRO of Loudon & Roane Counties at (865) 986-3015 any day of the week.

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