Hurricane Response and Emergency Restoration

Summary provided by video transcript.

Hey there, Nick Lavelle here with RestoreMasters. We’re currently at the Charlotte Square Condominiums in Port Charlotte, Florida shortly after the devastation occurred from Hurricane Ian.

When you’re dealing with a massive loss like this, there’s a couple of different services that go on. First, we start off with emergency services, which is closing up the envelope to make sure that no further damages occur from water penetration, water mitigation, which means we’re moving anything from inside of the building and doing all the testing to be sure that we don’t have any more moisture or growth, and then the build back for the project, which is going to be putting the new roof on, building it back up to code, and then getting the units back to pre-loss conditions.

We’re currently standing up on top of the Oxford House, which is one of the HOAs we’re working with in this complex. First and foremost, as we talked about, is performing emergency services. This roof system from front to back is about 230 squares. We had 38 penetrations, which means that there was plenty of areas for the water to be able to enter the building. The first thing we needed to do was to close up the roofing system. We put a 60-mil TPO membrane on here that’s heat welded together. Now, why this is important is because a lot of folks think that you could just put a blue tarp on top of the roof. When you have a flat roof with no slope, unfortunately, it’s going to start penetrating through there. You’re going to get additional water damage. What we do is we have experienced welders come up here and they heat weld everything together so you just have one solid membrane all the way across the board.

Now, in this situation as well, the community did lose power, and there still are some units that don’t have power because it’s not safe. What we’ve done is we’ve put generators up on the roof. We ran extension cords down. What we’re doing with this is we’re powering all the dehumidifiers inside each individual unit to make sure that we keep the moisture level down. Let’s go take a look.

Additionally, one thing that did happen with this particular building, as you can see, it’s actually happening right across the way back there as well, is that when the wind came through, there’s actually a tornado produced through this hurricane, is that it removed about a third of this roofing system here. We didn’t have decking, trusses, any wood to mount anything. Part of the emergency services was building up the trusses and putting in all the decking so that way we could re-adhere this membrane to prevent any further damages.

Currently we’re standing inside of the unit right now. As you can see behind me, we’ve got a ton of debris, and obviously we’ve got power here to the hallways, but a vast majority of the units still don’t have power, which is why we’re running the generators. We plug in dehumidifiers both in the common areas and inside of the units, particularly because right now we’re trying to stabilize things until we can get all the moist materials removed. As you can see behind me, another portion of closing up the envelope is definitely making sure that not only are all of the windows loaded up that were affected by the storm, but also we want to make sure we get all the soffits. What we do is take the measurements, the guys come down, individually cut each piece of wood and secure it up underneath the building and in the face to make sure we don’t have any further leaks.

If you’re a commercial property owner that’s been affected by any type of storm, wind, water, hail, fire, you name it, feel free to give us a call. My name’s Nick Lavelle from RestoreMasters. Thanks for stopping by.

Hurricane Damage Response • Roof Wind Damage Repair • Roof Hail Damage Repair • Emergency Roofing • Roofing • TPO Roofing • Water Removal • Water Damage Restoration • Interior Restoration • Exterior Construction • Total Build Back