When catastrophe strikes your home or business, your insurance policy requires that you immediately make every reasonable effort to stop the damage and protect all insured property from further or additional damages. These actions are called “loss mitigation services” in the insurance industry - they are effectively emergency ‘risk management’ services delivered after-the-fact.
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Secondary damages generally far out-strip the costs of the primary damage - for example: the physical damage caused by the average fire is typically a tiny fraction of the secondary damages caused by water, smoke, soot, odor, contaminants or fire department personnel. And, in cases where the damages have been permitted to sit awhile unabated, the costs to repair can increase exponentially.

For these reasons, insurance coverage is conditioned upon an immediate mitigation response that stops and cleans up these continuing and additional damages whether structural or contents or both. These emergency property damage and restoration services are covered by insurance and must thereby reduce the scope of damage as well as the time and cost to repair.