In case you didn't know, the freeze of January 2014 was a monumental catastrophe in the mid-south, and we don't use that term lightly. We'll be telling our grandchildren about this one. Many people are still dealing with the effects of it, and it could be months before life is back to normal for some of them.
Sure, you couldn't see the devastation by merely driving through the streets like you could if it had been a hurricane like Sandy, or if it had been a flood like the one in Nashville a few years ago. Even so, you'd never know the difference by the number of emergency calls received by our franchise and other local disaster mitigation companies last month.
Water damage from frozen pipes that burst after the hard freeze the first week of January affected what we can only guess was thousands of homes and businesses in the area. We had over 170 requests for service in three days.
The calls flooded in all at once (pun only slightly intended), and nearly overwhelmed our office staff. We had expected a big increase in volume because of the freeze, but the volume of calls we eventually got was far beyond anything we had imagined. We have a whole new level of respect for our customer service representative, Trudie, who showed an incredible amount of grace under pressure. It's not easy dealing with people who are (in many instances) in a panic because their home or business is flooded, but Trudie did so with patience and sympathy for the customer. She even called each one of them back every other day until we were able to get to them, just to reassure them that they had not been forgotten.
Our crews of technicians, having already worked a full day on several other big water losses when the calls started coming in, mobilized quickly and began stabilizing the situation for as many customers as possible.
It's hard to know where to begin in a situation like that. Do you prioritize based on the order the calls were received, or do you base your response on the level of crisis the customer is experiencing? We decided to base it on the crisis level, making the ones that presented serious safety concerns the highest priority. If there was standing water in a large portion of the structure, and if there were ceilings or walls becoming unsound, we wanted to stabilize the situation immediately.
Our water technicians worked late into the night on that first evening, many of them having worked late the night before. Hats off to them, by the way; we've never seen people work as hard as those guys did. They sacrificed sleep; they sacrificed plans they had made; and they sacrificed time with their families to make sure we could do our best for those who depend on us in an emergency.
Temperatures are starting to warm up now, and spring is just around the corner. It looks like the worst of the cold weather is probably behind us for this year. Now the spring rains and the storms that come with them are on our minds. I hope all the Memphis area roofs are water-tight and ready for that, but if not, we're ready to respond.
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