SERVPRO Provides Disaster Recovery for Wichita Businesses

9/14/2020 (Permalink)

Fires and water damages often come in pairs. In this commercial building all the hanging tiles collapsed and what was left was a soggy sooty mess.

Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” which is especially true when it comes to maintaining your building. It is estimated that 50% of businesses that close due to a disaster never reopen their doors again. The majority of businesses that do reopen their doors have a plan in place. Here at SERVPRO we can help prepare you and your business so that your downtime is minimized, the scope of the loss is reduced and a plan that gets things moving smoothly is ready to go.  

Preparing for Disaster

There are a lot of resources from the Department of Homeland Securities website that are organized by disaster which are great to review so that you can target the threats specific to your business here in Wichita. For example there is a Tornado Toolkit available which is certainly pertinent around here. 

Some good general advice is at minimum you should:

• Make an Evacuation plan and exercise it
• Have a communication plan with your employees in the case of an emergency
• Create a business continuity plan to become operational again quickly
• Create redundancies for important documents and data

 Emergency Ready Profile

One thing SERVPRO of Northeast Wichita helps with is creating an Emergency Ready Profile or ERP. We do this by walking your building to identify, photograph, and log every water, sprinkler, electric, and gas shut-off as well as anything else that would be pertinent. We take down all the relevant contact info of people in your organization as well as any other companies that you wish to be contacted (such as security, plumbers, HVAC etc.).

We then take that information and create an emergency binder for your organization as well as an app which can be consulted in the event of an emergency. 

This ERP make sure that everyone in your organization has access to an information source on how the building works. This means that if a pipe breaks or the sprinklers go off and the person who knows the building is not around steps can still be taken to stop the damage and minimize the scope of your loss. Here in Wichita ERPs have saved organizations and businesses 10s of thousands of dollars.

Preauthorization and Emergency Service Limits 

Additionally we can set-up preauthorization and emergency service limits for our mitigation and restoration work. Normally when we arrive onsite we need paperwork signed and if an authorized signer is not around that can really slow things down. Additionally there can be some concern about cost and payment which also slows down our work.

When we create a preauthorization agreement with an emergency service limit we have preauthorization to start working on the building and limit on how much that work will cost. Doing this means work starts and finishes faster and you can be confident that the emergency service costs will be within the limit you set. 

While no one can be 100% safe from what life throws at us being prepared means getting back to normal faster which can mean the difference between staying open or not. Everything SERVPRO does as far is ERPs and preauthorizations go they are completely free so call us today and let's start preparing! 316-684-6700