The Story of a Water Loss Emergency

It’s 4 o’clock on Sunday afternoon and the phone rings. We have a water loss with three floors partially flooded. They ask, “Can you come and help?” So much for watching TV and relaxing! Actually, this is exactly what it means to be an “emergency response” company.

A&J is an emergency response company, responding 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year so everyone here is used to plans changing very quickly! This is what we train for; this is what we do for our clients; this is what the Code Red Disaster Planning Program is all about.

Back to the loss. The water started on the 2nd floor and flowed down to the 1st, and then to the basement.

The race is on; our client wants and needs to know, how quickly we can get the water extracted, the drying equipment set and most importantly, the doors back open?

No client wants to be closed for business — so re-opening can’t happen fast enough for any of our clients! Unfortunately, cleaning up a water loss takes time. (No offense to our clients). The water damage was in a high security, temperature-sensitive area, had walls with multiple layers of vinyl wall paper, ceiling tiles that were falling down, wet cabinets, documents and contents were soaking wet, and of course the infamous wall with five, yes five layers of insulated drywall.

As the adventure unfolds, our Project Managers’ at A&J had to work fast to pull in as many water damage technicians as possible – as quickly as possible! Trucks left the A&J building and headed to Madison, packed full of water extracting equipment, drying equipment, and technicians ready to tackle the water damage clean up.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this water loss, the average residential water loss would require 1 dehumidifier, 7 fans, and typically no air scrubbers. For this commercial water loss, we needed 33 commercial grade dehumidifiers, 120 high velocity air movers, and 5 large capacity HEPA filtered air scrubbers. That’s A LOT of water!

The remaining three floors had varying amounts of damage. With that said, this is where A&J will turn rooms and areas of the remaining floors into ‘drying chambers’. By building temporary, non-defacing barriers, this helps reduce the amount of equipment needed and allows employees and staff occupying unaffected areas to continue to work and operate as usual. The least amount of lost time for our client and their employees was the driver to getting this building back to pre-loss conditions as fast and efficiently as possible.

This commercial water damage loss was an example of how our Project Managers, Technicians, and Staff are valued for our drying knowledge, coordination skills, communication skills, and our endurance. Our expertise, speed of response and experience really can help our clients get back to business sooner and ultimately save money.

A&J Specialty Services, Inc. is a full-service, 24/7 emergency water damage restoration company serving Madison, Middleton, Fitchburg, Verona, Monona, McFarland, Stoughton, Cottage Grove, Sun Prairie, DeForest, Waunakee, Wisconsin Dells, Lake Delton, and surrounding communities of south-central Wisconsin.