The fire is out and nobody tells you what happens next. Here is the order that protects your safety, your claim and your belongings — in roughly that priority.
Do not re-enter until the fire department clears the building. Then: secure the property, don't run the HVAC, and photograph everything before you move it. Call your insurer to open the claim and ask about Additional Living Expenses on that first call — it pays for where you sleep tonight.
Structures stay dangerous after the flames are out — weakened floors and roof members, hot spots that can reignite, and smoke that's still toxic. Wait for the fire department to formally release the building.
Ask the responding department how to obtain the incident report. Your insurer will want it, and it establishes cause — which matters if anyone later disputes it.
On that first call ask three things: what does my policy pay for temporary accommodation, who is my adjuster, and is emergency board-up covered. Fire is a core covered peril, so this is rarely about whether you're covered.
ALE covers hotel, meals above your normal spend, pet boarding and storage while the home is uninhabitable. It's one of the most under-claimed parts of a fire policy because nobody mentions it and people don't keep receipts. Start keeping them tonight.
Board-up and roof tarping stops weather and trespass, and your policy obliges you to prevent further damage. Emergency mitigation is normally covered — keep the invoice.
Running the system pulls soot into the ductwork and redistributes it through every room that the fire never touched. It is the fastest way to turn a contained loss into a whole-house one.
Wide shots of every room, then close-ups, then a narrated video walkthrough. Photograph the source area, the smoke lines on the walls, and the water the hoses left behind. Contents get packed out quickly on fire jobs, and once boxes leave the house your visual record is all you have. Ten minutes here is worth thousands later.
Almost every serious house fire is also a water loss. Suppression puts hundreds or thousands of gallons into the structure, and that water behaves exactly like any other flood — it soaks into drywall, insulation, subfloor and cavities, and it starts the mold clock.
Mold can begin within 24 to 48 hours. So while you're dealing with soot and insurance, someone needs to be extracting water and running dehumidification. Firefighting water is covered as part of the fire claim, so this isn't a separate battle — but it is a separate task, and it's the one most commonly left too late.
Across the fire-market reviews behind our city rankings, basements and rebuild come up far more than soot does, and pack-outs are mentioned constantly. Homeowners describe fire jobs as three overlapping problems — smoke, water and contents — and the crews they rate highly are the ones that treated all three as one job rather than three invoices.
On a significant fire, contents are usually inventoried, boxed and taken off-site for cleaning and deodorising — a “pack-out”. Done well it saves things you'd assume were ruined. Done badly it's where fire claims go wrong.
In the reviews we analysed, mitigation work rarely draws criticism — but belongings that disappeared into storage with no updates for weeks draws it repeatedly. Agree at the outset who your contact is, how often you'll hear from them, and when items come back.
21 metros, ranked on real Google review data — never on payment.
Compare independently-ranked restoration companies in 21 metros — ranked on real Google reviews, never on payment.
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