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The
Cleaning and Restoration of Garments Subjected
to the Disaster of Fire and Flood
A
Specialty Service from Iris City Cleaners
Fires
and flood cause considerable damage to homes
and their contents. It is important to take
immediate, appropriate action. Carpets, draperies,
upholstered furniture and clothing, severely
water soaked upholstered furniture and clothing,
usually can be refurbished after a fire, except
for scorched or severely water damaged items.
Heirlooms
Iris City Cleaners often
restores one of kind garments to usable and
presentable conditions.
When wedding gowns for example, are damaged,
often parts of them can be remade and replaced
by our dressmakers.
Valuable vintage clothing is handled
with special techniques and can, as well, often
be restored for use or continued preservation.
Repair
As a part of our restorative
services repair of garments is customary and
major repairs are always options to our
customers.
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Since
the early 50's Iris City Cleaners
has served our surrounding
residents in the cleaning and restoration of
garments subjected to fire and flood. Since
that time we have managed thousands of garments
subjected to these extreme conditions and have
returned them to satisfactory used. A wide variety
of methods are used, depending upon the condition
of the garments and the causes of their conditions.
Smoke is composed primarily of water, carbon
dioxide, sulfuric acid, carbon, and many other
ingrediants depending on the source. Ozone application
is an important treatment to our management
of all smoke related odors.
Most home owners and some renters carry
some coverage on the content of their
homes. Apparel garment depreciation is difficult
to determine. Companies providing coverage tend
to support cleaning and restoration of garments
found in these conditions rather than to replace
them. And rightly so, most of the time, usable
household garments and textiles can be return
to service with in a few days to a week of delivery
to the cleaner. |
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Iris
City Cleaners uses an ozone chamber
built for the purpose of odor management in
textiles. Ozone is created electronically by
adding an extra molecule to the oxygen molecule
of O2 becoming O3.
This ozone molecule, which last only
about 20 minutes, is in gaseous form and is
10 times more powerful than chlorine as an oxidizer.
The ozone gas is kept in motion within the chamber
or treatment area to insure coverage of effected
areas.
When used correctly, it is extremely
effective in "killing odors" by attaching the
ozone molecule to the odor causing ones and
creating an ionic bond so that the new molecule
can be effectively removed by a cleaning method.
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Restoring
Appearance and Removing Odor From Clothing
Ozone
is used to treat all apparel textiles, which
have been subjected to fire or flood conditions.
Then soiled clothing is cleaned by a variety
of methods. All fire damaged clothing can
not be cleaned equally well by the same
method. Sort fire damaged clothing as you would
sort any soiled clothing by the recommended
care method (found on the permanent care label),
color and degree of soil. Some clothing may
require dry cleaning because of fiber content,
dyes used in the fabric or incompatibility of
fabrics such as linings and face fabrics. In
some cases, these articles may be subjected
to a careful wet cleaning process, even though
they are labeled dry clean only. This can be
done only with professional expertise when it
is felt that the garment will not be wearable
unless another process is used.
Sorting
and Cleaning We
sort washable clothing by color (light/medium/dark)
and soil (light/moderate/heavy). The majority
of clothing items will probably be cottons,
polyesters, and polyester/cotton blends. These
can be most effectively renewed by using a warm
water wetclean process with either a non-built
liquid detergent(EraTM) or a low phosphate powder
detergent and a liquid chlorine bleach (AllTM
and ChloroxTM). Therefore,
it may not be possible to reach the desired
state of color restoration or whiteness after
one or two washings. But visibly smoke
damaged clothing may be restored
after five wetcleanings. Note:
TM above only describes
some over the shelf products which are well
known. They do not necessarily represent
the products we use and there is no endorsement
of them here.
Summary
To effectively remove soot and smoke
damage from apparel items and household textile
and such as; carpet, draperies and upholstered
furniture, it is necessary to use the appropriate
chemicals, the right equipment and judgment
that comes from experience. Professional fire
restorers, and professional launderers and dry
cleaners properly trained, have the knowledge
and materials to refurbish household textiles
after a fire or flood. In
the long run, contacting a professional fire
restorer immediately can save money. Damaged
clothing in closets and drawers can be restored
by professional dry-cleaning or wet cleaning
methods.
Iris
City Cleaners,
since 1947, is a full service cleaner.
Click here
to take a peek at our disaster recovery services.
We are located at 211 West Washington, Mt. Pleasant,
Iowa 52641
Phone/fax 385 9707 www.iriscitycleaners.com
Periodically we
will feature some of speciality services, such
as the subject of this News Letter.
For Tips on family fire safety click
here.
Ed and Mary Longanecker |
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