 Following a fire in your building or neighborhood, expect to find soot and ash covering objects in your collection. If you're doing salvage work on site, expect a couple of other things as well. You're going to get very dirty, regardless of how bad the situation is. The keys to remember with soot and ash are, first of all, the sooner you can remove it, the better. The longer it stays on any surface, the harder it is to get it off. Removing soot and ash quickly is the goal, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. The fire may be over, but you'll still need to take some precautions before dealing with any objects, like wearing a long-sleeve shirt and long pants, maybe a hard hat, and sturdy shoes or boots. You'll also want to wear gloves, safety goggles, and a mask, because breathing in those particles can be hazardous to your health. A basic understanding of soot and ash should help you deal with them more effectively. The main thing is that they're not like dust that you can simply brush away. Soot is both abrasive and sticky, so soot will be stuck to everything, even the undersides of objects, as well as the top surfaces where it falls. Ash, on the other hand, is usually less greasy but a lot more abrasive. So in a soot-ash situation, you have two things going on. You have very abrasive grit, which you don't want to move around, scrub or rub, or grind into anything. And you also have greasy materials that are very sticky, so it can be hard to get the soot or ash off of your objects. Removing soot and ash takes great care. You should first find out from the damage assessment whether they're wet or dry. If the soot and ash are wet, say from fire hose water or a burst pipe, don't do anything to remove them. Because then you have the greasy interaction of the soot with your object, the abrasiveness, and also the complexity of adding water to that mix. And in that case, it's best to try to get advice from a professional. If the soot or ash on the object is dry, you can begin removing it. This takes two essential pieces of equipment. Two things you absolutely have to have if you have a soot-ash situation are a vacuum cleaner, preferably one with a HEPA filter and soot sponges. A HEPA filter vacuum is designed to trap nearly all the particles it picks up inside the machine. Instead of exhausting some out the back, like an ordinary household vacuum, more and more they can be found at retail stores. When vacuuming, leave the object in place if possible. If you must handle it, grasp it in a place that will not show smudges, like a mount or support. Then vacuum carefully. When you're vacuuming soot from objects, you don't want to smear or press the soot or ash into your object. You want to use the mouth of your vacuum hose and put it over the surface, allow it to do the work, and then move it to the next location. So you're actually not even touching the object when you're using a vacuum to remove soot and ash. And you don't want to use a brush to brush the materials into the vacuum cleaner because that's not what will happen. The brush will grind the soot and ash into the object. So you just want to use the suction power of the vacuum to remove the soot and ash. When vacuuming objects like textiles, leave them in place and don't unfold them beforehand. The whole idea is to try to vacuum everything just the way it is. So in this case, there's no need to unfold things because if you do unfold them, the soot and ash are going to fall onto places that hadn't originally fallen. Start with outer surfaces of the textile and then work your way carefully into crevices and folds. In some cases, it might be helpful for two people to do the job, one positioning the object and the other vacuuming. The same careful approach goes for other objects. Leave the object in place and vacuum without touching it. If you're going to vacuum a book in a bookcase, you want to keep the pages shut because if you open the pages, the soot and ash can fall down in between the sheets. So you want to make sure you vacuum everything just the way it is in the affected area. Make sure you replace vacuum bags often and wash the attachments frequently. When you're done, dispose of the bags, your gloves and any sooty material. But in some cases, you may need to take an extra step. After you've finished vacuuming, you need to examine the objects to see if you've actually removed the soot. If it's particularly greasy, it may not vacuum up into the vacuum cleaner, in which case then you need to soot sponge everything. This is an example of a soot sponge, which you can buy at major hardware stores. Unlike a regular sponge, it's not for wiping surfaces, and you use it dry. You lay it carefully on the area you want to clean, press gently, then pick it up. Then you will have a layer of soot and ash particles on that surface of the soot sponge. So you can't use that surface again. You either need to cut it off or turn the sponge and use another edge. Turn the sponge and use another edge. And then just keep cutting off, slicing off the outer perimeter of the sponge and continuing to progress until you've finished your cleaning. Ultimately, the sponge will be really tiny and you'll start with a new one. Dealing with soot and ash after a fire can be challenging, but by working methodically with proper equipment, you can do a great deal to salvage an object and keep it from further damage.