After there’s been a flood in your house or office, you might pick up all the rugs off the floor and hope that everything dries without causing problems or getting moldy.
But Jim Paradise would do things a little differently: he’d pull up the rugs, bring in commercial dehumidifiers, vacuums and dryers, apply a mold-resistant compound to the floor and sometimes even pull up the floorboards or open up the drywall to monitor for mold.
“Quite often, what people do is they extract the top carpet and they think the problem is resolved,” said Paradise, who started Paradise Disaster Restoration in Middletown 35 years ago. “But it really isn’t, because it could be the pad underneath the rug or the floor underneath that.”
This time of year, Paradise is staying busy cleaning up the messes made by broken water pipes and radiators around the state. In a basement a few weeks ago, Paradise found four feet of water that took days to pump out.
“If you had a radiator on the second floor and a pipe burst with nobody home, you could walk into a house with a ceiling down in the living room and a ruined oriental carpet and the water will go right down to the basement. It can soak the house and create a lot of damage,” Paradise said. “Our job is to … stop that from becoming more of a problem.”
Repairing after a flood is about controlling the environment, which includes making sure the humidity and temperature are just right. That’s tricky in Rhode Island. A “closed-dry,” where all the windows and doors are closed, usually works best here, he said.
Along with water-damage repair – a job that usually takes about four days – Paradise’s six-vehicle fleet specializes in mold remediation and cleaning up soot damage, usually caused by a backed-up furnace.
And there’s also a good amount of work cleaning up after vandals and home break-ins.
“If kids break into a house and throw eggs around or if somebody breaks into a house and cuts themselves,” Paradise said, there’s usually a mess to clean. “If they cut themselves on some broken glass, we’ll have to go and take care of some of the blood that may remain.”
Paradise is a second-generation cleaner. His father, Ed Paradise, ran Eddie’s Window and House Cleaning Service, which went defunct while Jim Paradise worked there.
But Jim Paradise’s background was in cleaning, so he started Paradise Cleaning in the early 1970s. He hadn’t initially planned to specialize in disaster cleanup, but one day a customer called with a problem: soot had covering their interior walls from a blown furnace. Paradise didn’t want to make the situation worse by scrubbing it with soap or water, so he called a new cleaning-supply distributor for tips.
“And he said, ‘There’s something new out. I’ll send you a sample of it,’” Paradise said. “It basically was this special dry sponge and when we used it on the walls, it took the soot off without even a trace.”
After the job was complete, the homeowner called his insurance company and an adjuster came to check out the damage. “And the insurance company adjuster liked what he saw in our work,” Paradise said. “He called us for a few things after that. So we started with that.”
Paradise started networking to pick up tricks for cleaning up disasters and joined industry groups, including the National Institute of Disaster Restoration and the Restoration Industry Association.
He started experimenting with new products in homes. “If you look at it nowadays, most of the [disaster cleanup] technology that’s been discovered has come from guys like myself that own businesses and who use different things to try to rectify problems in homes,” he said. “From sharing that, a whole industry has evolved.”
The number of annual jobs fluctuates year-to-year, but has been growing, he said. “This past year has not been a great year,” he added. “But, then again, it hasn’t been a great year for anyone.”
For Paradise, who keeps advertising to a minimum, word-of-mouth has always seemed to work best. Along with the main office in Middletown, Paradise has opened a satellite shop in Warwick. And Paradise still tries to make it to every job the company does.
“It’s about quality. It’s nice to come away from a job and have someone send you a letter that says we did a really nice job,” Paradise said. “And they’ll say, ‘Tell one of you workers’ – they’ll usually name them – that they’re grateful to them for the respect they showed in their home.” •COMPANY PROFILE
Paradise Disaster Restoration
OWNER: Jim Paradise
LOCATION: 170 Aquidneck Ave.,
Middletown
EMPLOYEES: 15
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1973
ANNUAL SALES: WND
