ServPro to complete a free emergency-ready plan for Ozark County-owned buildings

The Ozark County Commissioners on Monday gave ServPro the green light to begin an emergency-ready profile (ERP) that can be used to quickly and efficiently regroup after an emergency or natural disaster. ServPro is a national company with more than 1,900 locations, including a Mountain Home, Arkansas, office.

“It kind of goes along with a contingency plan,” ServePro marketing manager Mark Tyer told the commissioners. “When I used to talk to people about this and mentioned a contingency plan, their eyes would fade over, but now that we’re living through a pandemic, everybody is making plans…. For instance, what if the county government has to shut down and everyone work from home? … So we are all working on a plan now. A contingency plan is based on the what-ifs. What if this happens? How will we handle it?”

Tyer and co-worker Bruce Sanders, who also serves as a marketing representative for ServPro, gave the commissioners a brief overview of what services they provide, free of charge, and the commissioners were in favor of completing the ERP.

 “I think a man would have to be a fool to turn something down that’s free and can help us in an emergency situation,” Presiding Commissioner John Turner said. 

“Well, yeah…,” Western District Commissioner Layne Nance agreed. 

“We’ve had emergencies before. We’ve walked in here one morning and eight to ten of the windows were busted out, and we had glass all over the place. We had to get people to [repair] the doors, someone to fix the broken glass. So it’d be good to have a plan and all the information in one place in case something happens again,” Turner said. 

The commissioners gave the ServePro employees permission to begin the process to create a ERP, which will begin with a walk-through of the building. Tyer said the profile should be complete in a few weeks. 

Emergency-ready plan

At the end of the process, the emergency-ready plan prepared by the company will include a binder filled with all the information needed in case of an emergency.

“So let’s say you walk into the basement, and there’s a foot of water on the floor. All the information we gather will be right here in this binder and available on an app on your phone, so it’s easy to find everything,” Tyer said. “You’ll have the phone number for the water department, information and a photo showing you where the water shut-off is to the building, a phone number for the insurance company, contact information for HR, so you could call the people who work in the basement to tell them not to come into work that day. We go through and take photos of all the utility shutoffs, where the water shutoff is, gas, the electrical panels…. So it just gathers up a bunch of information and compiles it into a really easy-to-find format, so that in the event something happens, you have it all right here.”

Tyer said the profile will also include a lot of good information about the buildings themselves, including the year they were built and square footage of each room, as well as each floor and the whole building. 

“And we do this at no cost,” Sanders said. “People ask, ‘How can you do that?’ And the answer is that it’s a way for us to get out and get to know the communities we serve. We hope nothing ever happens at any of the buildings where you’d need to hire us, but if it did we’d hope you’d give us a call.”

“There is no obligation that you’d have to hire us if anything does happen, but I will tell you that our phone number is in that binder on about every page,” Tyer said, laughing. 

The men said they’ve worked with many other counties, commercial businesses and other groups to create these emergency-ready plans. 

“We’ve been working our way though the community. We did Baxter County… all their buildings, courthouse, court annex, sheriff’s department, health department, library, all the county-owned buildings, road and bridge,” Tyer said. “We’ve worked with churches, schools, manufacturing plants, doctor’s offices… just a lot of different types of places.”

The commissioners all agreed that the service would be beneficial for the county, especially since it’s free. 

“Bruce and I have talked about this for over a year,” County Clerk Brian Wise said, after mentioning that he’d met Sanders when dealing with flooding at his own house a couple years ago. “But it took like 10 minutes in my office of me and him talking about it for me to say, ‘Oh my gosh… it’d be reckless for us not to do this.’”

“I’d definitely give you permission to do our county buildings, and I don’t think the sheriff would have any problem going up to the sheriff’s office and doing the same thing,” Turner said. 

“I’ll take a free incident plan any day of the week,” said John Russo, who is employed at the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department as chief deputy and also serves on the Gainesville Volunteer Fire Department. 

Turner said he’d be happy to lead a ServPro employee on a walk-through of the courthouse, sheriff’s department, recycling center, prosecutor’s office, road and bridge shed and other county-owned businesses to begin the process. 

Paid services and disaster response

ServPro’s paid services include “extreme cleaning” in instances of floods, fire, storm damage, sewer backups, crime scene and deaths and other times when professional services are needed. 

“Most of our paid work goes through insurance companies. So if you ever had anything that happened where you’d need to hire us, your insurance is likely going to cover that,” Sanders said. 

ServPro also has mobile disaster-response teams available to respond when jobs are too big. 

“We have a facility that’s based in Mountain Home, and all of our equipment and is housed there, and then all of our work is out at people’s houses [or offices]…but these ServPros, they travel out of 53-foot trailers.”

Tyer said they often follow natural disasters.

“Whenever a hurricane hits, they head there. When there’s wildfires out in California, they head there. They’re basically storm chasers with big trucks, but we have them on speed dial. So if we get into something that’s more than we can handle, we can call them,” he said.

Tyer said they used the disaster-response team for a job at a Mountain Home school building that had flooded. 

“It was a two-story building. The upstairs was classrooms and downstairs was all these 10-by-10 offices, just a whole bunch of them… I think two full hallways of them… .They had a water loss, and we were just looking and figuring up how many dehumidifiers and fans it was going to take because each little office was going to require a certain amount of equipment. We figured that it’d take everything we had plus more. So we called these guys in. The ones we usually call are out of St. Louis, so you know they’re here in four to five hours.”

Tyer said the disaster crew arrived and took over the project with the extra equipment and crews. 

“It’s just good to know we’ve got these guys backing us up,” he said. “If it was a weather event, tornado hit and there was a lot of damage, they’ve got a [process] where anywhere we’ve done these emergency-ready profiles goes to the top of the list…. We’re going to focus on the places that we’ve completed these, because that’s a lot of information that they can use to get going right away.”

More information

ServPro provides free emergency-ready profiles for non-residential customers such as government agencies, commercial businesses, groups and churches. They provide paid services for both commercial and residential clients. Visit servepro.com for a full listing of the company’s services. 

For more information contact Mark Tyer at 1-866-445-8457 or 870-706-0446 or by emailing mtyer9840@gmail.com.