On a warm night in June, a violent tornado spun through Richmond, Indiana. Its narrow but very destructive path severely damaged the community’s mall. Nearly 80 percent of the mall interior was drenched, with portions of the roof missing and windows shattered. Dislodged air handling units had rolled across the roof in the raging winds and punched through in several places.
Despite the extensive damage, the property manager and insurance carrier set an aggressive schedule to return employees and shoppers to the mall, which included important community retail resources like department stores and big box office suppliers. “The insurance carrier, a company we’ve worked with for seven years, called us in to handle the drying portion of the work,” says Chad Holland, a general manager for the Mitigation and Contents Division of Paul Davis of Southeast Wisconsin. “We immediately got to work to meet demanding job goals.”
Paul Davis was the perfect choice for rapid, expert restoration. “We have a robust, trained staff that can perform at a very high level on large, complex losses with extensive contents and tight timelines,” Holland explains. “We’re very versed in coordination and communication. We held daily meetings and sent daily emails with progress maps.” The emails reached a large group of stakeholders: a main property manager, tenants, management companies for individual stores and an in-house construction team that followed Paul Davis technicians to rebuild as soon as drying concluded.
Paul Davis supplied many personnel, an extensive equipment list and state-of-the-art technology. A team of 50 technicians and five management personnel deployed air movers – 200 units – as well as large, industrial sized dehumidifiers. Some dewatering equipment used condenser technology, which operates on the same principle as air conditioning to remove moisture from air. Others used desiccant products that absorb moisture from air pumped into the units at high volume. The team utilized thermal imaging, moisture meters and moisture mapping to locate moisture and verify drying levels.
Paul Davis surmounted challenges, too, which inevitably pop up during disaster restoration. It’s a truism of this industry that every job entails challenges. “We were hired later by one big box store in the mall,” Holland says. “Another contractor failed to properly mitigate damages and we were hired to get them back in business. Extensive mould had taken hold in their storage area. Fortunately, mould treatment is one of our specialties.”
The job wrapped up just as roof repairs finished, an astonishing two weeks after the tornado ripped through a community’s gathering place. “This job illustrated what we hope for on every project: specialists from Paul Davis completing the job expertly and quickly, customers that fully trusted our team, capable partners and customers and employees saying that it looked like nothing had happened,” Holland says. “Customer service and doing the right thing wins every time.”
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