March has truly been a weird month in retrospect. A lot of good things have happened in this time period. I realized that IT is not what I want to do for the rest of my life and simultaneously, I figured out what it is that I want to do.

I practically grew up in the disaster restoration industry. My father has trained countless individuals in this increasingly growing field. I spent three weeks this month learning about the proper methods of flood, fire, odor and mold restoration as well as attending an annual trade show for the entire industry. The whole thing had a massive effect on me, to the point that I want to do more work within this field because things make absolutely perfect sense and the only thing that matters is efficient results.

Building science as a whole is very fascinating, especially when you can see the cause and effects of most building-related maladies. For instance, while drying a flooded room for training, we realized that the relative humidity was very high in that room because of all of the evaporation taking place; at a rate faster than our equipment could pull it out of the air. It would have been a problem if we had let it get worse. The corrective measure? Because of the weather outside, we merely opened the windows and gave the equipment a chance to catch up. Within seconds of opening the windows, the relative humidity in the air dropped significantly because the warm humid air was released to the atmosphere (no need to waste time pulling the water out of it) and drying was able to be accelerated. This is called an open-drying system. The underlying science is called psychrometrics and is a fundamental part of building science.

In short, it is fascinating to see this in action because it produces tangible results and gives you the personal feeling of satisfaction by taking on what is seemingly insurmountable drying a flooded building in 24-48 hours and (potentially) restoring everything inside to it’s pre-loss condition. Taking on the insurmountable always leads to the subsequent surmounting of the insurmountable.