Fire damage in a parking garage
The parking garage had a massive fire and an engineer was coming the next week to inspect the concrete and they needed all the black and ash removed in order to inspect the concrete.
So we had a company that made this a lot more complicated than it needed to be, and because of that was not meeting their deadline.
What they were doing, washing and vacuuming every drop at the point of washing using 8 people to shovel the water into trash cans. In one day they filled up 60 trash cans (the larger ones you use for outdoor pickup). They completed 20 percent of the job in three days.
We sent in two guys and got the rest of the job done in 10 hours.
We produced 1 and a half totes of waste water.
What did we do?
We had a drain that sends water to the bottom of the parking garage. We had a tote set where the water was going so it didn't flood the basement. We had charcoal water filters that are 10 feet in length surrounding the water run points to filter the water and slow down the trailing of the water.
This will allow a lot of the water to evaporate. The tool we use to do the final touch ups is a suttner ST36 (I get them from pressure washer products in Clearwater Florida for around 180$) and send the remainder of the sludge into a 55 gallon drum sitting at the mess. Have a drum dolly to move the drum as needed.
A lot of cities are extremely strict, and some customers are even more strict on waste water. When you get into bigger jobs that question you hear of "what do you do with the waste water" gets asked. Well this is one way to do it without having to buy a 20,000$ vacuum system you'll use once every six months. Now if you find yourself cleaning parking garages monthly, I do think they are useful and save a lot of labor.
To give you an idea on the kind of money made on jobs like this, it ended up paying about 450$ an hour and we ended up doing the job for 13 hours total after touch ups and figuring out what to do with the waste water.
Why does it pay a lot? Because there are a lot of obstacles and hazards involved and price is actually less important than "can you just get this done".