Storm response

The promise this page will not make

There is no guaranteed response time on this page.

After a named storm, what is actually possible is governed by road access, fuel availability, grid power, crew safety, and the number of simultaneously damaged sites across the region. None of those is knowable in advance, and a contractor who prints a fixed arrival window on a website is either not thinking about it or hoping you will not.

A guaranteed service level is a real thing and it belongs in a contract, with a named response time, a named remedy and a price attached. If you need one, telephone and we will talk about what can be committed to and what it costs. What this page can honestly describe is the sequence we follow and what we need from you to start it.

Before the storm

The work that decides how a portfolio comes through a hurricane season happens in spring, not in September.

Generators load-banked, not just started. A machine that runs ten minutes unloaded every month has proved that it starts. It has not proved it can carry the site for three days.

Fuel checked. Diesel degrades. Old fuel is a common cause of a generator that starts, runs for twenty minutes, and stops — which is the worst possible failure mode because it looks like success.

HVAC serviced before summer. A blocked condenser will run all winter and fail on the first genuinely hot afternoon, and a redundant unit that has quietly been carrying the site alone for a year is a single point of failure nobody knows about.

Structural condition known. An inspection in April tells you which structures are marginal. An inspection in October tells you which ones were.

The sequence after an event

1. Ground-level assessment. Access, fencing, fuel, flooding, energised conditions, and whether the compound can be safely entered at all. Nobody climbs before this is done, and on a proportion of sites this is where the assessment stops for the day.

2. Visual structural assessment from the ground. Obvious damage, plumb by eye, guy condition, anchor condition, debris and foreign objects on the structure. Enough to decide whether a climb is safe.

3. Climb inspection where the ground assessment supports it. Photographed against each member, coded by severity, to the same standard as a scheduled inspection — because the report will be read by an engineer and possibly by an insurer.

4. Power and HVAC restoration. Which is usually what actually brings the site back. Structural damage is the headline; a flooded generator and a dead HVAC unit are the outage.

5. A written report per site. So an owner can prioritise a portfolio rather than react to whichever site telephoned loudest. On a multi-site event this is the single most valuable thing we produce.

What we need from you to start

A site list, with coordinates rather than names where possible — after an event, landmarks and signage are frequently gone.

Access information, including who holds keys and whether escorts are required. Post-event, the usual contact is often unreachable, so a second name is worth more than it sounds.

Your priority order. If we can reach four sites on day one and you have eleven, we would rather you chose which four than have us guess.

Any known conditions: which sites lost power, which had reported alarms before the event, which are on generators now.

A named decision-maker who can authorise work in the field, because post-event work generates decisions faster than a normal approval chain can absorb them.

How it is priced

Post-event assessment is priced per site on a routed list — the range is on the rates page. Remediation found during assessment is scoped and priced separately once the condition is known, because pricing a repair before seeing the damage is guessing.

Emergency call-out outside a planned programme is priced against availability at the time, and we will tell you what that is on the call rather than after the work.

Everything found is documented to the same standard as scheduled work. Insurance claims and engineering assessments both depend on that documentation, and a hurried photograph is worth very little to either.

If a site is down now

Telephone (407) 423-9071 and say so in the first sentence. An outage and a planned programme are different conversations, and the first should not wait behind the second.

Outside working hours, telephone anyway and leave the site, the problem and a way to reach you. This site does not claim a staffed 24-hour line, because that is a promise a caller would hold us to at three in the morning and it is not one we have published terms for.