Florida: Hurricane Ian

Hurricane Ian: The Path to Recovery

How FIRST ONSITE Property Restoration Mobilized Efforts

First Onsite is rebuilding the Florida communities after the devastation Hurricane Ian caused in October of 2022. Hear firsthand from our Command Center in Orlando, FL how our teams have mobilized and what they’re doing to help those affected.

– [Danny] I’ve been through Hurricane Andrew and I know what that devastation looks like, so I try to put myself in the property owner’s shoes. The residents, the children that are displaced, the kids that can’t go to school.

– We’re currently in Orlando responding to Hurricane Ian in our National Command Center, so we’ve mobilized our internal ops team to help logistically out in the field and coordinate our efforts for all of our clients and our emergency response.

– We’ve brought in resources from California, from Washington state, from New York, and a lot of folks here in Florida, and we’ve brought everybody here together to kind of integrate and properly get out to all of our clients and their properties and assess damage and get it going.

– We plan throughout the year for storms such as this, so as soon as we know that there’s a disturbance in the water, we start to plan for it.

– The command center really is what really, truly can make this event successful for us as an organization, ensuring that we get to our clients in a timely manner.

– [Fred] It’s priceless, right? A lot of these folks don’t work together every day, so having everybody here in the same room to be able to communicate is absolutely priceless.

– [Heather] Operationally, as calls come in to our 800 number, and we send them out to our operational team, depending on needs and locations, dispatching extraction crews, equipment crews, roofers, anything that they need in response to storm damage.

– So the first things we’re gonna want to do, start checking for moisture. You know, we’d have to check walls, we’d have to check carpets, we’d have to check flooring. We want to get it all cleaned out. We want to get it dried out. If we need anything, whether it be air movers, dehumidifiers, you know, any supplies and stuff we need, the laydown yard guy, those guys are really, really good. What they do is they make sure you give ’em a list of what they need. They load it in box trucks and they’ve got ’em shipped out to you, you know, pretty, pretty quick.

– That’s gonna go on the order with the yellow Isuzu box trucks.

– [Worker] This one?

– Yeah, yeah, yeah. We handle anything and everything that has to go to a job site, so right now, being that we’re out here in the hurricane, we touch anything and everything that’s going to a job site, whether it’s equipment or supplies, it’s going through our hands. Depending on how bad the job is is gonna be what kind of equipment they need. So that’s our main three is dehumidifiers, air movers, and air scrubbers.

– It happens really quick. You know, we’re gonna come in, we’re gonna say, “Okay, this, this, this, this, and this is wet,” then we just get a scope of the work, find out exactly what has to be taken care of, and we’ll start putting the trades together. We’re gonna cut it. We’re gonna start drying it, or so we can actually get air moving through that place in the business so it can get dried out.

– We’re able to keep things under control by truly taking one assignment at a time not losing sight of what’s transpired in Fort Myers. You know, what they just suffered was, you know, huge impact to the community.

– It’s tough, right? ‘Cause the first week or so there’s a lot of bad situations, and we’ve got thousands of people out there in the field that are physically on site helping these people get through all kinds of terrible situations. It’s very nice that we’re able to do what we do, but to see what they’re going through, it’s pretty tough.

– [Jose] It’s times like these, you know, that we’re here to support community for whatever they need. It gives you a good feeling inside, and especially when you’re able to help all these people in the surrounding areas.

– [Heather] So, as a Floridian, it definitely hits close to home for me when we know that there’s been such devastation. I love that we are a solution for our clients and our employees and their families when they experience a loss.

– [Fred] I think everybody is emotionally affected by it, but I think there’s a sense of pride that we all take in being able to help our communities recover from devastating effects from Hurricane Ian.

– [Danny] We’re here trying to service our customers to try to get them back to normalcy. There’s a long road ahead, but we’re going to be there along the journey.