America’s Elite
Sean Ryan, owner
765 W. Washington St., Sequim
360-912-1412
24-Hour emergency service
Few residents can miss the red, white and blue moving truck with America’s Elite emblazoned on the side at 765 W. Washington St. in Sequim but moving is only a small part of what this versatile and specialized company does.
In 2012, longtime area resident Sean Ryan opened his own independent, licensed, bonded and insured business under the nationwide America’s Elite banner.
“We offer water and fire mitigation and restoration, repossessed home renovation, general contracting, trauma scene cleanup and moving services,” explained Robert Porrazzo, the company’s manager.
Added Ryan, “I saw the need for a good restoration company on the peninsula. It’s a good market and it helps people, too.”
The bulk of their business is responding to water pipe breaks that flood floors and drench drywall.
“Probably the more common service is water loss from a broken pipe that causes floor and wall damage. Our job is to go in and dry the structure appropriately so mold doesn’t grow and we’re trained in water damage mitigation,” Porrazzo said. “We also provide mold testing and removal. For fire loss, we do salvage of the homeowners’ personal items and retrieve and restore them.”
“Drying out is really scientific — if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can cause a lot of damage,” Ryan noted, stressing the worst thing a resident can do to a wet room is crank up the heat because heat plus moisture equals mold.
Typically, when a home has sustained water damage from a clear water source like a burst pipe or overflowed bathtub, the customer calls and Ryan’s team mobilizes with its equipment, including giant dehumidifiers, to the residence, arriving within an hour. Porrazzo or Ryan does a walk-through with the client while mentally developing a mitigation plan and documenting the damage electronically. They discuss the plan with the homeowner and determine if the damage is such that an insurance claim should be filed.
“We start by extracting the water from all surfaces, removing personal items and placing furniture on special foam blocks so the legs won’t get wetter,” Porrazzo said. “If we can get to a loss in four days we generally can save the sheetrock and carpet — wet sheetrock can be dried to its original hard state. The sooner we’re able to get to a loss, the less tear-out, which is better for the homeowner and the insurance company.”
Moving services
“We learned we’re really good movers and we can move anything from a household to vehicles — and we will go across the country,” Ryan said. “We also do civil standbys for evictions and will help evictees or landlords get items out of the property.”
The company offers expert packing and loading.
Trauma and compassion
Although both Ryan, a six-year volunteer firefighter, and Porrazzo, a paid and volunteer veteran firefighter/EMT for 12 years, have seen plenty of trauma and death, working on a trauma cleanup case is never without emotion for them. The aftermath of a suicide, murder, other traumatic or delayed discovery death in a home and the cleanup it requires is daunting.
“Trauma scenes are the hardest because there’s emotion there. (As a firefighter/EMT) a suicide always broke my heart because there was a person hurting inside. When we come in (as America’s Elite) what’s left is a family hurting inside,” Porrazzo said. “The hardest thing to do is hand grieving people a bill. It’s more than a job for us.”
“With trauma services, compassion is our thing,” Ryan said. “We get emotionally attached — at the end of the cleanup the survivors consider us family. It’s impossible to remain unattached. And confidentiality with us is huge. We don’t talk about it or attract attention when we’re there in cleanup.”
“I’d rather it be us rather than a Seattle company just doing a job. We make trauma go away the best we can,” Porrazzo said.
Community service
Ryan said the company has five full-time employees and seven part-time ones and that he makes a conscious effort to hire veterans and people on public assistance to train them for family wage jobs.
“We’re actually trained as first responders — a lot of us trained with Clallam County Fire District 3 — and we require all our employees to have CPR and first aid training,” Ryan said.
“They’re also required to stop and assist if they see a situation. We also provide $25,000 in scholarships of $750-$1,500 to students at Sequim High School and provide Christmas for families identified to us by Head Start. We really do try to give back to the community.”
