An August 11 lightning strike in the vicinity of the Pierce County Courthouse set off alarms and sent fire crews racing to protect the historic building, but when they arrived on scene there was no fire — just a lot of dust. Ironically, the very dust meant to protect important legal documents in case of a fire would become the primary obstacle to keeping the courthouse open for business.
While no fire had broken out, an alarm was set off by the electrical discharge and the building’s fire suppression system was triggered, releasing flame-retardant dust into a vault attached to the magistrate judge’s office.
After securing the site and ensuring there were no heat sources from actual flames or embers, firefighters placed large fans in the affected area, trying to disperse the dust in the same way they would normally disperse smoke.
According to the official Blackshear Fire Department (BPD) report, “To prevent further dust migration, all office doors were closed. Negative pressure ventilation was established to prevent migration into other areas of the building.” With the alarms reset, the courthouse was turned back over to maintenance.
The following morning prior to ServPro’s arrival, various Pierce County officials posted advisories to their social media accounts and courthouse employees placed signs outside the building itself to inform the public the courthouse would be closed until further notice since the dust was hazardous to breathe, but once ServPro was on site another complication emerged.
“The dust is hazardous,” says Project Manager Mike Williams, head of the Serv-Pro team called in to decontaminate the courthouse. “And it is also incredibly corrosive.”
The pale yellow dust is not only dangerous to breathe, it can eat away at the inner workings of machinery and electronics. Despite BFD’s best efforts, the dust had indeed migrated. The vault got the worst of it, but the fire suppression dust had gotten into the building’s HVAC system, spreading the particles to other areas.
Due to the chemical’s corrosive nature, all of the stored legal documents and other materials, including the computers and other electronics could begin to corrode from the inside out at an accelerated rate— and not just in the vault. This required taking a detailed inventory of anything that could be adversely affected by the dust for insurance adjusters to review, a process very familiar to Williams.
“This isn’t even a typical insurance claim,” said Williams. “The county uses Association of County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG), so we’ve been working with Blake Gilbert. We’ll inventory everything up front, even if it doesn’t seem to be affected. A computer might be working just fine and a few months later be completely eaten up by rust.”
ACCG handles insurance for county governments, including Pierce. Gilbert then brought in a second company, Electrostar LLC, a tech restoration company specializing in electronic and industrial restoration, to handle the computers, while ServPro tended to the building itself, including the ventilation system which helped spread the dust throughout the structure.
Originally, it had been thought the courthouse could be reopened last Thursday, but that date was later modified. Familiar with recovery efforts after similar events, Williams estimated the courthouse would not be ready to reopen until Monday.
“I told everyone, I know this is your lives and this is incredibly inconvenient, but this is for the best.”
A team of eight ServPro workers, protected by gloves, goggles, TyVek suits and M94 respiration masks, began working from top to bottom, starting on the second floor. Another pair of workers used special equipment to dislodge any particles in the HVAC ducts and then purge them. By Thursday, the upstairs courtroom and adjacent offices had been cleaned.
The courthouse reopened to the public Monday morning as scheduled, dusted from top to bottom.
