Commercial Challenges

9/2/2022 (Permalink)

Heavy plastic creating a temporary door over an opening allowing power cables into a building.

Commercial Challenges

Every water damage is unique however commercial losses can present a great number of challenges not experienced in residential losses.  An obvious difference is the possibility for a much larger sized water damage.  This difference does not necessarily create the need for outside the box thinking but rather just more of everything, more equipment, more workers, more services.  The old adage of how do you eat an elephant comes to mind.  The project manager need only to divide the loss into sections and handle the loss by "taking one bite at a time" and direct the resources accordingly.

Commercial clients understand time is money and they need their regular operations to stay just that, regular.  While it is no fun to be displaced from your home, residential customers can temporarily move out if need be and live with a generous family member or stay at a hotel or Air BNB if their home is uninhabitable during mitigation.  Commercial clients cannot just manufacture their goods in another location or temporarily move into another store front to service their customers.  Working with commercial clients to help minimize their loss of business during mitigation takes creative thinking and teamwork.  The mitigation crew may work around the clock to speed up the return to normal operations or they may work out a plan to hold off mitigation in some areas so the business can still operate and then switch areas of work and areas of mitigation once another section is finished.

Recently we worked at a Physician's Center that had multiple suites affected by a water loss.  The individual units did not have access to enough power to run the necessary drying equipment to mitigate the loss properly.  The way the building was laid out did not accommodate some of the regular ways to run cables from an outside generator into a building to provide the additional power necessary.  The solution to keeping the building secure yet being able to run power from outside it in this scenario was to hire a security guard to keep watch over the premises 24-7 until the drying was completed.  The added expense of a security guard was more than offset by how much more quickly the loss was dried and regular operations returned with the drying equipment able to run continuously until the job was dry.

These are only a few examples of challenges unique to commercial mitigation work.  Should your Cleburne business suffer a water loss, rest assured the mitigation team of SERVPRO of Crowley and S. Johnson County can work out the creative solutions necessary to make your water loss "Like it never even happened" and you back to work quickly!