The Effects of Fire Damage to Businesses

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Office and commercial property fires often have devastating and far-reaching consequences. While the property damage might seem the most obvious effect of fire damage, there are many other losses that make the recovery of business very difficult.

Property damage

Property damage caused by fire may be more extensive than it seems, as smoke and soot spread around the premises settling on surfaces that weren’t even affected by a fire. The negative effects of smoke and soot get worse every hour after the firefighters put out the fire; in several weeks, some of them are already irreversible. This is why delaying with fire damage restoration substantially drives its costs.   

Keep in mind that trying to clean up the fire damage on your own to save precious time is not a good idea either. Entering the affected structures without specialized protective equipment may be dangerous. Moreover, wiping or cleaning residues you can smear them, so you will make matters worse.

Business Losses and Downtime

For any brick and mortar business, a commercial fire immediately translates into a downtime. If larger areas and contents are affected, it might take weeks or even months to return the property to the pre-fire state. The longer your business operations is on halt, the more difficult it is to compensate for the lost revenues.

Additionally, businesses can lose expensive equipment, which can not easily be replicated, or raw materials outsourced from distant suppliers. Although the digitalization of the world makes the loss of physical documents less painful, some businesses still suffer the consequences of losing essential and unique documentation to fire.     

Effects of Fire Damage on Employees

Although the assessment of losses starts with the calculation of restoration and repairs cost and lost revenues, businesses may lose a lot of competitive advantage due to the negative effects of fire damage on employees. Even if no one is injured in the fire, the scary event and the very image of a damaged office lowers the morale of employees and makes their productivity drop. Some employees may not be willing to wait for the business to complete the restoration work and resume operations and will be hired elsewhere.

How Can Your Business Minimize the Negative Impact of Fire Damage?

Of course, it is always best to prevent fire by strictly following the fire safety rules. Regular risk assessment and constant changes to the working areas and procedures might also avert the disastrous consequences.   

Nevertheless, random events leave no one 100% secure. Thus, any business should have a disaster recovery plan that would specify how it would deal with the effects of fire damage. To avoid tough decisions or time loss, such plan should determine not only the steps the management should take in case of commercial fire but also contacts of the specialists they should call up, a fire damage restoration company in particular.

While no service can take away all the negative effects of fire damage to businesses, timely professional support of a fire damage restoration company is often vital in minimizing the downtime and the related losses. Make sure you have specified one in a disaster recovery plan of your business.    

 

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