Floods, Fires, And The Cleanup Crew

Who To Call After Damage

Meet Amy And Her Story

Christine 0:04

Welcome to Arcadia FYI. I’m Christine Zito, your host, and I am so happy that you are here. We like to keep you informed. That’s why it’s called Arcadia FYI for your information of the events, information, business. And outside of the city of Arcadia, because like I said, we’re all one big happy family here in the San Gabriel Valley. All right, before we get started, I’d like to thank our sponsors, Longo Toyota in El Monte. You know I’m gonna say it. You gotta go out there and check it out. They’re on this huge acreage of cars and other things. They do more than just sell cars. You gotta go out there and just check it out. Star Seven Financial Services with Francine Chiu. She has your investments all ready to go, your retirements all ready to go. She can keep you on track with your money. The Santa Anita Park. I can’t believe, you know, you know what? 2028 is gonna come like that. I mean, time just flies. The Olympics are gonna be coming and we’re gonna have the Olympics there. Not only that, if you like to see the horses and you see some races, there’s races going on right now. And Le Méridien Hotel in Arcadia and Pasadena. We gotta go check that hotel out, huh? We got, you know, I gotta get a hold of Gaby and we gotta go over there and check it out. It’s really it’s a really cool I love it there. Alright. For your information, we’re gonna talk about business today. We’re gonna talk about services that you may not know that you can use or refer. For example, have you ever had a flood in your house? Say like the water the water heater broke and you wake up and there’s like it’s all flooded, and you come home and you all and it’s all flooded. Who do you call? No, not Ghostbusters. Alright, I’m gonna tell you who to call. Speaking of time, and I was talking about uh the 2028 Olympics. I can’t believe it’s been over a year since the Eat and Fires, and there’s people still going through that mess. And as you can see, I have a very special lady in studio, and the person or the people that you call is SurPro. They have been there through the Eat and Fires even today, helping helping people through this mess. In studio, I have a very good friend of mine too, Amy Farrarij. Did I say it right?

Amy Moufarrege 2:22

Was I called Mafarege?

Christine 2:25

Almost called Okay, so you know my weaknesses, names. It’s it’s crazy. So all right. I want to talk about your business and talk about you know the fires, of course, that that are still very prominent uh issue here because we’re so close to it. But I want to get to know who Amy is a little bit. Yeah. Okay, so uh were you were you born and raised here in Arcadia, Los Angeles, California, anywhere in the United States outside the New York?

Amy Moufarrege 2:53

In the United States for sure. Um, but I uh was born and raised in Sunland, California. So it’s about what 30 minutes away from Pasadena. Um, and my dad actually opened the franchise uh back in 2006. Um, and that was around the time I was still in um high school, and it wasn’t until after high school that I started helping him out little by little until finally I was convinced to take on every single responsibility.

Christine 3:21

Yeah, I know. I being a business owner, yeah. That’s it. It’s why I drink. You think this is uh late in watering? Yeah, right. So are you married? Have any kids?

Amy Moufarrege 3:33

Um no, but I have a boyfriend that uh we’ve been together about three years, I’ve known him since high school as well, so we kind of go way back and um yeah, very happy in that right now.

What Property Restoration Includes

Christine 3:44

And that’s kind of so you’re off the market, you’re not dating, so you see? Okay, I was gonna try and help her out, but that’s okay. So, okay, so we talked about how you got started a little bit with SurfPro and with your dad. So what what is it that is that you exactly do?

Amy Moufarrege 3:59

Yeah, so we’re property damage restoration, uh, which means that when your property is damaged in any sort of way, primarily uh water damage, like you said, a flood, a water heater burst in the middle of the night, uh toilet overflows, maybe uh you have a kid that flushes toil uh toys down the toilet and that clogs it up, and a whole big mess comes in after that. Um that’s where we come in. We do all of the cleanup, we dry out the property, we make sure that you don’t develop any mold. Um, and we’re full service construction. So if there’s any materials that are damaged, we rip it out, but we go ahead and replace it.

Christine 4:36

Um You mean you actually like put the drywall up there, paint it, make it look like it didn’t even happen?

Amy Moufarrege 4:41

That’s our that’s our tagline. Like it never even happened.

Christine 4:44

Oh, that didn’t I didn’t know that.

Amy Moufarrege 4:46

It is.

Christine 4:46

Oh, it’s just really good.

Amy Moufarrege 4:48

Yeah, that’s that’s basically our goal is to make you feel like the water loss or a fire damage never happened in your property. Um, we bring your property back to the condition it was before everything happened. And sometimes, you know, homeowners sees this as an opportunity to maybe remodel that bathroom that they’ve hated looking at. Maybe their kitchen didn’t like they didn’t like the way their kitchen flowed. Now is the opportunity that we come in and we can do a full remodel. Um and not only that, I mean we yeah, we take care of mold, we take care of uh fire and smoke, like you mentioned with the wildfires.

Christine 5:22

With the with the eat and fires. Real fast, let me let me go talk about the eat and fires because that is still a big for you when it first happened and this whole myth started last year. What what did you see when you started going out? Um, because you saw you saw it just right after it happened.

Amy Moufarrege 5:41

Oh, we we saw it immediately. Um, because our service area is Altadena. Uh we have three franchises. We have Arcadia, Pasadena, now Hanberh. And Pasadena, uh part of Pasadena’s franchise is Altadena. And literally the mid like midnight of that happening, I had over maybe 300 phone calls in one night, and every single day after that.

Christine 6:05

Oh my gosh.

Amy Moufarrege 6:06

And um, yeah, so we saw from the beginning all the devastation. I mean, our guys were in there right away. We were doing inspections, we were giving estimates, we were talking to insurance companies, um, and trying to get approvals as fast as possible to get these people back home.

Christine 6:20

Man, and then after a year, it’s still insurance, it’s still still going on. So what was the worst that you saw?

Amy Moufarrege 6:28

Uh, I mean, we saw full homes uh burned down. Um, but we in the homes that did survive, there’s a lot of devastation. Just because your four walls are still standing doesn’t mean everything inside of it still is. Uh there’s smoke infiltrated in the walls, in the floors, on your furniture. Um, so we do a full service of cleaning all that stuff up to make make it feel a little bit better.

Christine 6:54

Wow. I mean, did it I know this is like getting too a little bit emotional, but did it ever make did it make you cry to go and on the Yeah.

Amy Moufarrege 7:02

I can’t I mean the stories we I mean we would sit on the phone with customers for a long time listening to you know what their situation was. That maybe I had situations where somebody had just bought their home a month before and literally practically lost it. Um homeowners that I we just finished construction for got their houses burnt down. We literally had just finished construction maybe a couple months before, or we just did a water damage for. Um and our guys they would drive around the area to going to inspections and they would notice we did a water damage there, we did a water damage there, and now there’s no property.

Christine 7:41

Man, that is so amazing.

Amy Moufarrege 7:42

So with but you also uh like okay, so the the businesses or the houses uh that didn’t burn down, you go in there and do you do air duck work by any chance or we don’t do air duck cleaning, but we bring uh everybody that anything that we don’t do, we bring in involved so that way the homeowner doesn’t feel like they have to do all that homework for themselves. We do it all for them. Um so we don’t do duck cleaning, but I have a a company that does that and we bring them in under our umbrella. Uh we build it all in one billing to the insurance company, so not there’s no overwhelming feeling to anybody, and we kind of try to minimize that as much as possible.

Christine 8:20

That’s good. So what if could could I ask you, are you doing a job right now?

Amy Moufarrege 8:26

We are, we are doing a fire job right now.

Christine 8:28

You’re doing it really? And and and maybe we should go on the I think we should go on location and see exactly what it is that you do.

Amy Moufarrege 8:35

Yeah, because can we do that? I can explain it all day, but you seeing it makes a whole big difference.

Christine 8:40

Oh, this is great. So, this is a house that’s that’s still going through the mess after a year.

Amy Moufarrege 8:45

Yes.

On Location At The Job Site

Christine 8:45

Oh, let’s go. Well, let’s go. All right, let’s go. I love it. All right. We’ll see you there. Okay. All right, let’s how’s my hair? All right, we’re gonna go. I’ll see you over there. All right, here we are. We just left the studio, um, and we’re here in Altadena. And um, we’re at a at a job site with Amy, and she gave me a shirt so I could be part of the crew, which is great. How’s it look? Looks great. Looks great, yeah. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna, you know, do any cleaning. You never know. Hey, yeah. Yeah, she might put me to work and stuff. So so tell me now that we’re here, okay. We talked about you guys do clean. Well, you know, you tell us. Yeah, you know, we’re here on the job site, tell us kind of like what we’re gonna we’re gonna go inside, but kind of set us up for the scene.

Amy Moufarrege 9:34

Sure. So uh what we’re doing here is a full um cleanup from the uh wildfires. So the house has been uh vacant since uh January of last year. Wow, can you believe it’s been a year? Yeah, over here. It’s been crazy. Jesus, crazy. So we started already with um attic rem uh cleanup. We removed all their insulation from the attic, we cleaned it all up, replaced it with brand new insulation. So that work is all done, and now I have the crew on site and we’re doing the cleanup. So we’re cleaning it from top to bottom, from ceilings down to the walls, windows, floors, kitchen cabinets, contents. So, yeah, I got the crew in there working now um doing that cleanup started.

Christine 10:12

Alright, well, let’s go inside and see this and see. I mean, hands-on what you do. Yeah, let’s go. All right, you know what, and by the way, um, why don’t you bring the heat? Isn’t it spring?

Amy Moufarrege 10:23

Hey, you know me. I don’t know.

Christine 10:24

Let me let me grab the camera. I’m gonna grab the camera and we’re gonna go inside.

Inside The Home Cleanup Walkthrough

Insurance Help And Wrap Up

Amy Moufarrege 10:28

All right, come on in, we’re gonna go inside. All right, so as you guys can see here, um, this is one of the uh rooms we have here. Uh loads of ash and soot buildup um just from it being so long sitting here. Um and these are the kinds of things that we see and the kinds of things that we clean up. So we’ll clean up from the ceiling, down the walls, all this would be um, all the floors would be cleaned and all the furniture as well. And normally start off with uh vacuuming first. So we vacuum up all of this uh loose debris. Um that way we make sure we’re not clearing it around everywhere. We do clean up the window scale, but we want to go to the street. Um, and that’s just uh great care of. And um after we did we finish the uh vacuuming, we do a full wipe down of all the surfaces and we place air scrubbers when we’re all done to make sure we filter the air. So if we come in this way, we’ll see um some more dust. You can if we go into the hallway, we’ll be able to see the girls working. Come into one of these rooms, they’ve already gotten started in the bedroom here, and so she’s cleaning up the windows from the inside and out. So if we want to keep going, we’ll be able to see some more action. So we got more window work going on in the bathroom. We’ve got um really detailed work that we got there. Yeah, so it’s it’s a lot of scrubbing, a lot of vacuuming, a lot of wiping, um, and we keep going until we’re all done. So uh we want to make our way through here. Um we’ve got more work going on in another bathroom, cleaning out the uh window blinds. So now we’ll head into the kitchen, and kitchen’s been emptied out already. Uh we dispose usually of all the food because they’ve been exposed to uh contaminants. So, kitchen, we have a lot of buildup on countertops and we clean the cabinets inside and out, we clean all the window ledges, um, like I said, the blinds um inside and out, the screens. Um, and tomorrow we’ll be doing pressure washing, so we’ll be able to take care of the outside. All right, well, that’s uh you get a little preview of what we do here. Um, so if any of you guys are still dealing with uh wildfire issues, if you have problems with your insurance companies, we’re here to help. We help this customer um get through to her insurance, make sure she got paid out, and now we’re doing the work.

Christine 13:19

All right, thank you, Amy, so much for being on Arcadia FYI. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. You take care, right? We’ll see each other next time. That was so much fun. I’m gonna be doing more shows like this because going out on location, it gives a lot of perspective of what some of these businesses are trying to explain or you know, places that that people talk about. It is it is just really a lot of fun. And if you’re listening on your podcast channel, I’m hoping that we created that theater of the mine so you can really be with us on location. I would like to thank our sponsors, Longo Toyota in El Monte. Swing by, say hi to Brooke or Mike. They’re like on this huge acreage of land that I keep talking about, and they do more than just sell cars. Star 7 Financial with Francine Chiu taking care of all your financial investments, 401ks, um uh even finances for your kids’ education. The Santa Anita Park. The Olympics are coming up in 2028. We’ll be talking to Pete uh more about that, but also there’s racing still going on, so you can uh check that out. The Le Méridien Hotel in Arcadia. You know what I love about Le Méridien? It’s their fish tacos. You gotta just try it’s a beautiful hotel. They have a great restaurant, a great bar. Gotta go buy and check it out. All right, until next time on Arcadia FYI. Be blessed and make it a great day.