Here are the questions people call us about most in Long Beach
These are the ones that come up on the phone and fit nowhere else: whether you can stay in the house while the fans run, whether we take commercial buildings, biohazard, boarding up tonight, asbestos in an older building. SOS Restoration does water, fire, smoke, mold and sewage mitigation in Long Beach, 24 hours a day. Call (657) 660-4185.
Can I stay in my home while the work is happening?
Usually you stay, and most people do. On a two-room water job what you are living with is four or five air movers, the flat fans that lie on the floor and blow sideways along the baseboard, plus a dehumidifier, all of it running day and night for about a week. The house gets loud and warm. The power bill goes up. People sleep through it.
A few jobs flip that answer. Sewage inside a living space. Plastic sealed across the only bathroom. A structure the fire department has not released yet. A newborn in the house, or somebody whose asthma is already hard to manage. On those, leaving for a few nights is the honest call, and you should hear it in the walkthrough rather than find it out on night two.
Pets are the part people forget. A dog knocks the dehumidifier hose out of the drain in the first hour.
Do you handle commercial buildings, or only houses?
Both, and in Long Beach plenty of the calls are honestly neither one: a nail salon under six apartments, a dental office on the ground floor taking water that started on the third. We dry the whole path the water took, tenant space and common area both. Who ends up paying for which ceiling is a separate fight over whose policy owns the loss.
Offices, restaurants, retail, apartment buildings, and the shared hallways and garages in between. Same two or three people, same air movers and dehumidifiers. On a restaurant a negative-air machine comes too, which is a filtered fan that pulls air out of the work zone so nothing drifts across the line into the kitchen and costs you the health inspection.
What actually delays a commercial job is the signature. It has to come from somebody with authority to sign for the building, usually the owner or the property manager, and that is rarely the tenant who called. Who holds the master key decides whether this starts tonight or Thursday.
Do you do biohazard and trauma cleanup?
Yes, SOS Restoration does biohazard and trauma cleanup in Long Beach: unattended deaths, blood and body fluids after an accident, hoarding conditions, sewage. Same crew, billed by the hour like the rest of the work.
Call and say plainly what happened. Nobody on this end needs it dressed up. If the property is still an active scene, the Long Beach Police Department or the county coroner has to release the building before any contractor can walk in, and that release goes to the owner or the executor, who has to ask for it. You will hear that on the phone. Nobody drives out to tell you.
Can you board up or tarp a property tonight?
A kicked-in door or a storefront with the glass out gets covered the same night, billed by the hour like everything else. An open building keeps taking weather and it keeps taking visitors, every hour it sits open waiting for daylight.
Roofs are a judgment call. People fall off wet shingle in the dark, so on a lot of jobs the right move is to catch the water from inside, protect what sits under it, and tarp at first light. Storm damage in Long Beach covers what to do with the bucket in the meantime.
If you are hesitating because you do not know who ends up paying for the plywood, keep the receipt. The California Department of Insurance tells homeowners that reasonable temporary repairs made to stop further damage are reimbursed out of the loss settlement. Covering the opening tonight is not money the claim never sees.
Do I need a mold test before you can start?
No, and paying for one first mostly buys you a delay. Where the growth is visible and there is a water source to point at, sampling is unnecessary in most cases, and that is the EPA’s published position, not ours. Find the leak and the mold stops growing. Test it and you have a report.
The list of situations where a test does earn its cost is short, and mold removal in Long Beach walks through it. One of them comes up on this line often enough to name: the buyer’s inspector wrote a sentence about moisture and stopped there, because mold was never inside what that inspection covers. What the inspector can and cannot do is its own piece.
My building is from the 1960s. Does asbestos change what you can tear out?
In a Long Beach building from the 1960s it changes the order of operations: the suspect material gets sampled before anything comes out of the wall. Close to four out of five housing units in Long Beach date from 1979 or earlier, so material of that age is treated as present until a sample says otherwise, instead of assumed clean until somebody gets unlucky.
What gets sampled in a building from that era, typically:
- joint compound at the drywall seams, the white filler smoothed over the joints and screws
- textured ceiling, the popcorn kind
- 9-inch and 12-inch floor tile, and the black mastic, the tar-like glue, underneath it
- pipe and duct insulation
- roofing felt, and the putty holding old window panes in their frames
A survey has to happen before any demolition or renovation, and the exemption written into the rule is narrow enough that most jobs miss it: a single-unit dwelling, under 100 square feet of the material removed or stripped.
Past that line, South Coast AQMD, the regional air district, wants written notice ten working days ahead of the work. Ten working days is usually the longest single line on the schedule.
Whether your particular job clears the exemption is a question for the survey and the district. Anybody who answers it for you over the phone is guessing. Meanwhile the water gets stopped, and everything that can dry without touching the suspect material dries.
Do you do odor removal on its own?
Sometimes, and it is worth saying out loud when the work would waste your money. Smell is a symptom. Musty means water is sitting somewhere you have not looked yet: under the toe kick, the set-back board beneath the kitchen cabinet doors, inside a wall cavity, in the carpet pad that never came up, behind a baseboard that looks fine. Deodorizing a house with a live leak buys three weeks.
Smoke works differently. The residue is still down in the pores of the framing, and heat and humidity push it back out, which is why the smell returns the first warm afternoon. The fix is washing the wood and then sealing it with shellac primer, a coating that locks the residue in so it stops off-gassing. An ozone machine on its own moves the date, not the problem.
The cheap version is real, though. Wet carpet caught in the first day: pull the pad, get air moving across the slab, and the smell usually leaves with the water. If it does not, something behind a wall is still wet, and what you have is a water job rather than an odor job.
¿Hablan español?
Sí. Llame al (657) 660-4185 a cualquier hora y explique lo que pasó en español, sin buscar a nadie que traduzca por usted.
What happens after you leave?
What is left behind is paperwork, and it is the useful kind. Daily moisture readings from each wet material, every one of them compared against a dry standard, the meter reading from an untouched part of the same building. Photographs shot before anything moved. The equipment log. The tear-out list, which says what left each room and the reading that decided it.
The next contractor prices the job from that file, and whoever handles the claim reads it when they want to know why a wall was opened twelve inches up. Drying, cleaning and removal is where our part stops; we don’t rebuild. The person who picks it up should not have to ask you what the wall looked like underneath.
When you hire that person, ask for their state license number and check it yourself, and get the scope in writing before any money moves. Then ask who is pulling the permit. If the answer is you, walk.
How the company works is on the about page. If your question is not on this one, the contact page carries the same number and a person picks it up.
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Your phone number is the only thing we really need. Everything else helps us load the truck right.
If something in your building is wet, burned, or smells wrong and you are not sure who to call, call (657) 660-4185 and someone in Long Beach will pick up, whatever hour it is.