Tornado Emergency Repair and Building Restoration

Summary provided by video transcript.

A tornado ripped through Shawnee, Oklahoma, late Wednesday night, and Brookdale Shawnee Senior Center was directly in the path of this destructive storm.

This is the most significant natural disaster in the history of OBU. That’s 113 years.

Hey, what’s up everyone? I’m Olivia Kraft.

And I’m Nikki Irvin.

Today we’re here in Shawnee, Oklahoma at Oklahoma Baptist University.

Follow us this way, let us show you around.

You’re seeing right here. This is on the Oklahoma Baptist University campus. It’s hard to see. The roof ripped off of it like this.

So the reason that we’re here today is because about three days ago, around midnight, an F3 tornado ripped through the main part of the campus and affected over 70 of their buildings.

Some of the main damage you can see here are roofs ripped off, ACs blown off, windows busted out. We have a ton of work to do to get this university up and running again.

So immediately following the tornado, within three hours we had groups on the ground ready to help. Now, the first thing that you do in a situation like this is first established that everyone is safe and that there are no casualties. We determined which buildings were structurally sound and which ones were not safe to go into, which is why you can see behind me there are some barriers around a lot of these buildings.

And the second thing that we do is we begin to mitigate and tarp and cover all of the roofs that have sustained damage to ensure that no water gets inside. So we’ve shrink-wrapped a lot of the flat roofs. We’ve tarped a lot of the roofs that have missing shingles. And now I’m going to take you with me to show you some of the damages.

So one of the billings you can see behind me here is Rainy Chapel. Now, this is one of the first buildings that was built here on campus, so it’s one of their historic buildings and unfortunately, it was in the direct path of the tornado. So as you can see, the historic clay tile roofing system was actually peeled back on top of itself.

So you can see here, we removed the old roof and now we are securing the rafters so we can install the decking so we could have it all dried in.

Senator Langford’s assistant was here on site yesterday morning. She said, “Got concerns about the city. I have no concerns about OBU.” And her statement to me was, “President Thomas, you need to tell your entire team that’s working with you we’re all so impressed. And OBU and the team that’s making this happen is leading the way in the city of Shawnee.” So that’s because of you guys and just said, “Hey, I just want you to know you need to thank that response team again because OBU is light years ahead of where everybody else is.”

So another building that you can see behind me is Shawnee Hall. It’s a historic building on campus that also sustained substantial damage. The roof has been imploded and a ton of the windows have been blown out. So one of the things that we’re doing is boarding up all of the windows, reframing the roof so we can put a temporary covering on top since we do have rain coming tomorrow so that no more moisture can get inside.

A lot of debris from that roof over there flew over here, puncturing this roof. Follow us this way and we’re going to show you how we’re going to patch it up.

So as you can see, we’ve removed quite a bit of the debris from the parapet walls and from the rest of the roof. And we’ve installed these patches of modified bitumen over the old sections of the wall to ensure that no more moisture gets inside the building from the hole. So now that we’ve established safety and proper mitigation, we’re going to talk about one of the most important parts of the claims process, which is documentation, which is why we have an entire team going in front of all of our workers and documenting the damages and the process of the repairs.

Taking proper pictures and documenting correctly is one of the reasons why we have such a great relationship with the insurance companies.

Thank you for our contractor friends. Thank you for our mitigation experts, our roofers, our construction friends, our structural engineers, all the folks that have worked around the clock for seven days straight to get us to where we are.

So as a recap, there was a massive tornado that ripped through Shawnee. It affected all of the buildings here. We had boots on the ground within three hours, and we established safety, mitigation and proper documentation of the whole process. Now, if you find yourself in a situation where you’ve been affected by a hailstorm or tornado or a hurricane, give us a call. Check us out. We can handle your project. I’m Olivia Kraft.

And I’m Nicki Irvin. We roof America.

We have RestoreMasters right here.

Tornado Damage Response • Roof Wind Damage Repair • Emergency Roofing • Water Removal • Water Damage Restoration • Interior Restoration • HVAC • Exterior Construction • Historic Restoration