Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

Healthy Indoors | 9 The second hurricane that hit us was Irma and it couldn't have zipped through the state with any more devastation. It kind of ripped right through the center of the state. Again, the hurricane died in intensity rather quickly, and we weren't hit with the substantial wind damage that you would associate with a hurricane. But we were hit again with the isolated tornadoes through- out the state. These little twisters are pretty devastat- ing, but they don't necessarily crawl across the state like where Derek Denis and I are from in Oklahoma. They just kind of drop out of the sky, cause devasta- tion, and they disappeared-- maybe not to return again. Again with Irma, we had a lot of rising water, much more than with Matthew. A lot of the problems in Florida had to do with high water. One of the things that I always point out to people is you stop seeing a hurricane in the news within a week of the hurricane. It's lost its luster and the news has gone on to some- thing else. I can assure you that a year after these loss- es people are still in need. That couldn't be more said for the islands right now. They are still in substantial need. So for me, the takeaway from this won't be as much about how we ap- proached everything, but the time to restore and reoc- cupy. Our job for our company after the storms is first onsite safety and second is triage. Remove what we can so we can save the structure. The thin layers of drywall and other building material, we'll pull those out rather quickly. We'll drop Kyle (his son) on a job and leave him there to monitor the gross removal of water-damaged building material and manage the structural drying and the intent is to do it safely and expedite the time to re- pair and restore and reoccupy that minimize the cost to do all of those. For us, we're going to focus a little bit on what led to the delays in restoring and what added to the cost to restore that led to the delay to reoccupy and we'll be talking about side-by-side comparisons in many cases, the buildings like damage and what we know during the initial assessment and the review of the losses afterwards that led to those delays. Photo Credit Lydia Lapotaire. IAQA panelists Sam Bergman, Travis West, John Lapotaire, Michael Bowdoin, and moderator Derek Denis in Chicago. Healthy Indoors | 9

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