000-000-0000 · 24 hours, every day of the year weekdays
6 people, one crew
There is no sales department here, and in this trade that matters more than it does in most: the person who reassures you at midnight should be the person who turns up in the morning.
The national franchises answer their emergency lines in a call centre. It opens a file and passes it to whichever crew picks it up, so the voice that calmed you down at two in the morning belongs to somebody who has never seen your street. The gap between what was promised on that call and what actually gets done opens up in exactly that space, and it is where most complaints about this industry come from.
Six people. The person who scopes your job is the person who runs it, and nobody here is paid on conversion — which is the practical, unromantic reason we can afford to tell you that your floor will probably flatten on its own, or that the call should be to somebody else entirely.
Owner · project manager
Terrence started on a truck-mount extractor in 1998 and opened the 61st Street shop in 2007, after a decade of being sent to jobs where somebody had already promised the customer something nobody could deliver. He writes the scopes, he attends the difficult adjuster inspections, and he is the person who decides that a thing cannot be saved — which he would rather say to your face on day one than have you discover on an invoice.
Operations · documentation
Yolanda runs the paperwork that decides whether a claim goes smoothly: the photographs, the moisture logs, the daily readings, the written scope and the salvage list. She is the reason this company's drying logs are legible and dated, and she is very hard to talk into leaving a limitation out of a report because it is inconvenient.
Water damage lead
Seán takes the three-in-the-morning calls and sets the drying plan. He has an unusual patience for chasing a leak back to its actual source rather than drying where the stain is, and he will tell you when a floor is worth trying to save and when you are about to spend four thousand dollars finding out that it was not.
Mould and indoor air lead
Anjali runs the remediation side, which means she spends a great deal of her time explaining why we are asking you to hire somebody else to inspect the work we are quoting for. She builds containment properly, she works to the assessor's plan rather than around it, and she is the person who says out loud that a health question belongs to your doctor.
Fire, smoke and contents lead
Rafael handles fire losses and everything that comes out of the building afterwards. He has a good eye for what will clean and an honest mouth about what will not, and he runs the contents store on the principle that somebody who has lost their home should be able to walk in and find their own things in five minutes.
Coordinator · scheduling
Mei Lin books the work, keeps the daily monitoring visits on the calendar, and is usually the voice on the other end when you ring during office hours. She is the one who chases your assessor, your adjuster and us, in roughly that order, and she is teaching everybody else to return calls the same day.
Who you get, and when
Somebody on this crew carries it, every night of the year. That is a smaller promise than most of the ones you will read tonight and it is the one we can actually keep. We will not print a number of minutes.
What you get is a person who knows what is in the van, an honest arrival time — including when that is three hours because we are already on a job — and instructions for what to do in the meantime. And if what you describe is not an emergency, you will be told that, and told what to do in the morning.
The same six people
There is no dispatcher routing your job to a subcontractor you have never met. Telephone and you will get one of the people on this page, and the emergency line is answered at any hour.