Life as a mechanical contractor can take you in surprising directions at a rapid pace. To my knowledge, Hollywood has yet to mine this field for the next pulse-pounding story, but we do work with a fair degree of urgency when it comes to providing tornado response and when reacting to other emergency missions. It is times like these that our expertise comes in to play. We are able get people back on their feet quickly.
A situation that comes to mind recalls a client whose plant had a large fire. They are located about two hours south of Chicago; we sent our president and one of our laymen to take a look at things. The structure happened to be a rice-grinding plant that fed two other plants in the small town. So when this client’s plant shut down, the other two plants had about 10 days before they were going to run out of rice and would also have to shut down.
We arrived on a Friday, assessed the damage and had a plan put together by Sunday. We told them what we thought it would take to get them back up and running and how quickly we could complete the project. They agreed, and we had our crew out there by noon on Monday. Within 11 days of the fire, we had them back up and grinding rice. The other two plants never had to shut down.
One of the reasons we are able to respond so quickly is that we have engineers on staff to do our design. If we had brought in outside engineers, it would’ve been two weeks before they even gave us plans back. Our engineers had a plan ready for the client in two days, and by executing it on the third day, we kept the town going. Sometimes you just have to act, because there isn’t always time to wait.
People choosing to hire a mechanical contractor need to hire a company with the resources to turn emergencies around quickly. They need to have a plan put together should the worst-case scenario happen.
I can tell you from experience that having a relationship with a company like TMS means you have someone who will step in and take care of an emergency should one ever occur. Rapid recovery means the difference between a business having to shut down or not.