I recently lost my home to a fire. When the fire dept ultimately cleared the home I tried to salvage what I could. Lost a bunch of mounted pictures to the fire itself. The part of the home not destroyed by fire was covered in smoke, water and fire retardant foam. I saved my laptop but MY HP Z3200 was destroyed by ash and smoke damage despite acover in place. My IMAC and MacPro were covered in soot and excessive heat. I cleaned the IMAC and it works for now. My external hard drives are filthy but seem to work. My photo gear in the basement were destroyed by water, foam and heat and gone, so no more leica and zeiss glass as well as my lighting gear and remaining darkroom equipment. My sony A7R was exposed to heat and soot but still worked because it was further from the fire itself. I purchased 2 new 4TB external drives and a dock to dump all my videos and images while my old drives are still intact. I plan on making 2 separate 4Tb drives. As if this was not bad enough my insurance company tell me that i only have $3K of coverage for the $18K of computer equipment so i screwed as far as the computers. My question is what to do with the cameras and lens that survived the fire but show damage. I assume that they will eventually fail or developed fatal problems. Should i insist on them being a total loss and refusing the insurance company's attempt to clean them? Is there any expert information that I can submit to the insurance company to prove that fire and soot exposed equipment can not be cleaned?
thanks
thanks