Water damage from putting the fire out.

Get extraction and drying started as soon as the building is released, before any smoke cleaning begins. Firefighting puts an enormous volume of water into a house, it goes into ceilings and wall cavities and insulation, and the window before that becomes a second, separate problem is short.

Most policies treat this water as part of the fire loss, which means it is covered without a separate argument.

Why it is often the bigger half

The burn is usually contained to part of the building. The water is not. It runs down through floors, along ceiling voids, into wall cavities, and into the lowest level of the house, so a fire in an upstairs bedroom regularly produces water damage on both floors and standing water in a basement.

Add what the fire service has to do to find hot spots: ceilings pulled down, walls opened, holes cut in the roof for ventilation. Those are not damage in the ordinary sense, they are necessary, and they are covered on the same claim. They also mean the building is now open to the weather.

The order it has to happen in

1. Board up and cover. Openings in the roof and walls, tonight. How emergency covering is done and who pays.
2. Extract standing water.
3. Remove saturated material that is not salvageable anyway: soaked insulation, carpet and pad, ceiling material that has come down.
4. Dry the structure, with equipment, to a measured target.
5. Then clean the smoke.

That order surprises people, because the black surfaces look more urgent than the wet ones. It is the right order because drying late produces mold on top of soot, and because much of what would be cleaned is coming out anyway.

The clock

The window before mold becomes likely is 24 to 48 hours from when material got wet, and in a fire the material has usually been wet since before you were allowed back in.

That is not a reason to panic; it is a reason to have a contractor with drying equipment on site on day one rather than day four, and to say the word “drying” to your insurer in the first call rather than the second week.

What to ask the contractor

Are you extracting and drying before cleaning? If the answer is no, ask why.

Are you metering, and will I see the readings? Drying should end because a moisture meter says so, not because a week has passed.

What is coming out? Wet insulation in a fire damaged cavity is coming out regardless. So is carpet pad. So is anything absorbent that took both water and smoke.

What is happening to the ceilings the fire service opened? They are part of the claim.

Contaminated water, sometimes

Water used on a fire picks up whatever it ran through. In a house fire that includes combustion residue, and where it has run into a basement it may have picked up drain water as well.

Treat it as dirty rather than clean: do not walk through it barefoot, do not run fans across it before it is cleaned, and expect the salvage decisions to be made in favor of removal. The rule that applies to anything absorbent that took contaminated water.

Insurance

This is one of the more straightforward parts of a fire claim. Damage caused by fighting a covered fire is normally covered under the same claim, including:

• Water damage to structure and contents.
• Ceilings and walls opened deliberately by the fire service.
• Broken doors and windows from forced entry.
• The cost of extraction, drying equipment, and monitoring.

Two things worth doing:

• Document the water separately from the burn. Photographs of wet ceilings two rooms away make the extent of the claim visible.
• Keep the fire report. It establishes what was done and why, which forecloses any argument that the openings were pre-existing.

The wider picture of a fire claim.

What to move, and what to leave

Move out anything absorbent that is not already ruined, and get it somewhere dry: documents, photographs, textiles, books. Wet paper and photographs are time critical and can be frozen to stop deterioration until a specialist can work on them, which is a genuinely useful thing to know on day one. What can be saved.

Leave the structure to the contractor. Pulling wet plaster down yourself in a fire damaged building is how people find out about the burned joist behind it.

The short version

The water is often the bigger half of a fire loss, and it is covered on the same claim. Board up, extract, remove saturated material, dry to a meter reading, and only then clean the smoke. Say the word drying to your insurer on day one, and photograph the wet rooms as carefully as the burnt ones.