Wow that fire is really hot!

10/21/2021 (Permalink)

Wow that fire is hot!

Recently we were challenged with a very extreme basement fire. The fire was so hot that it actually burned through several floor joists and created a hole in the first floor. It is estimated that this basement was over 1100 degrees Farenheit and with that much heat the fire doesn't just create soot, but it bakes the soot into everything. It's one thing to clean smoke and soot residue off of walls, ceilings, floors and belongings at the opposite end of a house from the fire, but quite another when extreme heat is a factor.

Baked on soot meets its match

They say that sometimes you have to fight fire with fire, but not in this case. In order to find a cleaning process that will get the baked on soot cleaned off we turned to . . . ice? Dry Ice actually! Dry Ice isn't actually ice in the sense that there is no water present in Dry Ice. It is made up of CO2 cooled and compressed into a solid and shaped into pellets that are about -109 degrees F. Special equipment then blasts these pellets at the surface that needs to be cleaned much like sand or soda blasting. Dry Ice blasting is less aggressive than sand blasting which is perfect for fire damage clean up without the need for heavy, burdensome suits and other personal protective equipment. The other major benefit is the speed of clean up after the blasting. Once the Dry Ice hits a surface it turns back into a gas and "evaporates" instead of leaving hundreds of pounds of media (sand, soda, etc.) to clean up.