The Mit List | Episode 5: Annissa on Wildfire Restoration is a Different Animal
Annissa Coy has spent almost thirty years teaching restoration crews how to handle fire losses. Four years ago, she got a version of that education she never wanted: a wildfire came within a mile and a half of her own home in Eastern Washington, and her kids and grandkids were the ones doing the evacuating while she was eight hours away.
In this episode, Annissa, owner and educator at Firehouse Education, sits down with Kate, Encircle’s Content Marketing Manager, to talk about what that experience taught her, and why she thinks most restoration contractors still underestimate what a wildfire actually does to a structure, and to the people who lived in it.
TL;DR: A wildfire isn’t a bigger version of a kitchen fire — it behaves differently, contaminates differently and traumatizes differently. During a violent fire season like this one, Annissa calls for more restorers to train up and help the thousands of families affected by wildfires.
Annissa Coy
Owner and Educator
Firehouse Education
Kate Coleman
Manager, Content Marketing
Encircle
A level two evacuation, a GoPro, and a roof going up in flames
Annissa and her husband were eight hours from home, moving belongings back to Eastern Washington, when her daughter called: the fire was two miles out and their property had been bumped to a level two evacuation. Level one is watch-and-wait. Level two means you need to be able to leave in fifteen minutes. Level three means you’re out, now, whatever’s in the car.
Neighbors were shrugging it off. Annissa’s family wasn’t. Her kids and grandkids started loading vehicles, the travel trailer, the Harley — everything they could move. Then her grandson called looking for a GoPro in her bedroom, and she describes the moment as oddly invasive, even though it was her own family in her own house. Minutes later her daughter called again: she was hosing down the roof, and she could see flames over the back of it from about a mile and a half away.
“I said, get out. I don’t care. All I could think about was all my kids and my grandkids evacuating this, and it was a horrific scene,” Annissa recalls.
The property survived. When Annissa made it home the next day, ash covered the deck and the front of the cabin they’d been living in, and the smell stopped her cold. That’s the moment she points to when she talks about wildfire trauma — not as an abstraction, but as something she’s now lived.
Why a wildfire messes with people differently than a house fire
Annissa’s day job means she’s no stranger to fire losses. But she draws a hard line between a one-off structure fire and a wildfire, and it’s not about square footage. A house fire is contained — it happens inside a structure, firefighters are on scene, and even if it spreads, there’s a sense of a defined incident. A wildfire doesn’t offer that. Wind can turn a thousand-acre fire into thirty-five hundred acres in half an hour. There’s no “the fire department has it,” only “it’s zero percent contained.”
“A wildfire can seem like it’s everywhere. It’s almost like this active nature that nobody can control… it’s so ravaging and it’s so violent in nature.”
Annissa Coy
Firehouse Education
She points out that the only real defense against a wildfire is fire itself — crews cut a line and set a controlled backfire to burn into the main fire and starve it. That’s how out of control the situation is by the time anyone can respond. For Annissa, the takeaway for restoration contractors is simple: if you’re doing wildfire work, dealing with the psychological weight of it isn’t a side note. It’s arguably the most important part of the job.
Ash isn’t soot, and it doesn’t behave like soot
This is where Annissa says she sees restoration contractors make the most costly mistakes. A structure fire deposits soot — often from burning plastics and synthetic materials, heavy, baked-on, sticky, and visible. Wildfire ash is a different material entirely: fine, dry and often invisible on a wall or ceiling.
The direction matters too. A house fire moves from the inside out. A wildfire moves from the outside in. Crews who don’t know that will walk into a home with white walls, assume there’s nothing there, and miss it entirely — because you can’t always see wildfire ash. You have to test for it.
Annissa’s method: a dry chem sponge, wiped across a wall. Pull it back and it’s solid black — with no visible mark left on the wall you just tested. That’s the gap crews miss. The other blind spot is the attic. Soffit vents are designed to let air move through the roofline, and that’s exactly how ash gets pushed up into the insulation. If you find deposits up there, they need to go in a vial and get lab-tested to confirm it’s actually fire ash before you know what you’re dealing with.
Annissa’s rule of thumb for sequencing the work: start outside. Power wash the roof, clear the sidewalks and exterior surfaces, then move the remediation inside — because working inside first while the outside is still shedding ash just means recontaminating what you already cleaned.
What happens when the ash gets left behind
The stakes for skipping proper testing are high, and Annissa’s clearest example is a nine-month-old. She was on-site explaining chem sponge testing to a couple who didn’t think their home had been affected. Their baby crawled across the carpet in shorts, barefoot, and when the mom picked the child up, the baby’s knees and lower legs were black from crossing the floor. The family left that day, and the whole house got decontaminated.
Beyond acute exposure, there are compounding risks. Bring cleaned contents back into a structure that hasn’t been fully cleared and you risk recontaminating them — Annissa’s had to go back and reclean jobs after exactly that happened. Miss ash in an attic and what could have been a cleaning job can turn into a materials-removal job later, with odor complaints resurfacing after the fact. None of this is exotic — it’s IICRC S700 territory, the standard that governs fire and smoke restoration — but Annissa’s point is that wildfire jobs demand the same rigor as any other fire loss, even when the damage looks less dramatic than a structure fire.
Triaging when hundreds of homes need help at once
When a wildfire moves through a neighborhood, contractors are rarely looking at one job — they’re looking at a street, or a whole subdivision. Annissa’s approach to deciding who gets attention first comes down to a few factors: proximity to the fire line (homes closer to where the fire actually burned tend to carry heavier contamination), vulnerable occupants (infants, elderly residents, anyone immunocompromised), and whether the area is even safe to work in yet — if crews are still “hot-spotting” and mopping up fifty feet away, starting remediation is a waste of time and effort.
In the meantime, there are stopgap measures: setting up HEPA filtration and hydroxyl generators to help manage air quality in a home that’s still waiting its turn. But Annissa comes back to one thing above all else — communication.
“People feel powerless. There’s this force of nature that they can’t control… if you can empower them, do so. The biggest way I believe you can do that is through education.”
Annissa Coy
Firehouse Education
Telling a family what you’re testing, why, and roughly when you’ll get to their home doesn’t speed up the work, but it changes how it feels to be waiting.
The shortage nobody’s fixed yet
Annissa’s closing point isn’t really about technique — it’s about capacity. She estimates thousands of wildfire-affected homes go un-remediated every year, not because contractors are cutting corners, but because there simply aren’t enough people trained to do this specific kind of work. She’s flown across the country doing wildfire consulting and even remote-consulted on Australia’s wildfires — by her count, 780 jobs on that engagement alone. The demand keeps outpacing the number of qualified crews.
Her ask for anyone in restoration who’s even a little curious about this work: get trained, get involved. As wildfires become a bigger part of the disaster landscape everywhere — not just the American West — the industry needs more people who understand both the technical differences and the human cost involved.
“If you’re watching and your heart is moved at all to help people, this is, in my opinion, one of the biggest ways that people could be served in this industry right now.”
Annissa Coy
Owner and Educator, Firehouse Education
Frequently Asked Questions
House fire soot typically comes from burning synthetic materials — plastics, fabrics — and it’s usually heavy, sticky and visible. Wildfire ash is finer, drier and often invisible to the naked eye on a wall or ceiling. A structure fire also deposits contamination from the inside out; a wildfire deposits it from the outside in, which is why crews who only inspect visually can miss it entirely.
Wipe a dry chem sponge (also called a soot sponge) across a wall or surface. If ash is present, the sponge comes back solid black — even when there’s no visible mark left on the surface you just tested. Attics need the same scrutiny: ash gets pushed up through soffit vents into insulation, and any suspected deposits should be sampled in a vial and lab-tested to confirm it’s actually fire ash.
Health risks are the biggest concern, especially for infants, the elderly or anyone immunocompromised — direct skin contact and airborne exposure are both real risks in a home that looks clean but isn’t. There’s also a recontamination risk: bringing cleaned contents back into a structure before it’s properly cleared can undo the work already done. And ash missed in an attic can turn what should have been a cleaning job into a materials-removal job later, with odor complaints resurfacing.
Because the contamination came from outside in. Power washing the roof and exterior surfaces first — instead of starting inside — prevents ash still on the exterior from recontaminating an interior that’s already been cleaned.
Proximity to the fire line is one factor — homes closer to where the fire actually burned tend to carry heavier contamination. Vulnerable occupants (infants, elderly residents, anyone with a compromised immune system) is another. And crews need to confirm an area is actually safe and stable to work in — starting remediation while hotshot crews are still mopping up nearby wastes effort. In the interim, HEPA filtration and hydroxyl generators can help manage air quality while a home waits its turn.
A structure fire, however severe, is generally understood as a contained incident — firefighters are on scene, the event has a boundary. A wildfire can feel uncontrollable and total, with no clear endpoint until it’s declared contained. Annissa lived through a level two evacuation herself and describes the psychological toll — the sense of powerlessness, the shattered sense of safety — as something restoration contractors need to take seriously as part of the job, not treat as incidental to it.
A shortage of trained people. She estimates thousands of wildfire-affected homes go un-remediated every year simply because there aren’t enough qualified crews to get to them — a gap she’s seen firsthand consulting on wildfire jobs across the US and remotely on Australia’s wildfires. Her message to anyone in restoration considering this work: get trained and get involved, because demand for qualified crews isn’t slowing down.