Situation/Background
As the Cedar River flood waters were cresting, Woodard received a call asking for assistance. A wet spring led to saturated ground that simply could not absorb the 8” of rainfall the state experienced in a few days. At its peak, nine rivers in Iowa were at or above historic flood levels, with the Cedar River cresting 12 feet above its historic peak, a record set 79 years earlier. About 450 blocks of downtown Cedar Rapids were flooded, including the city hall, court house and a hospital - clearly this wasn’t a typical small flood.
Response
Woodard responded with 25 water restoration technicians, 22 trucks and trailers, three trailer-mounted dehumidifiers, six industrial generators, and a semi-trailer containing several tons of additional water restoration equipment. In fact, we responded so quickly that the U.S. Army was still not allowing access to the flood areas until the morning after our arrival.
Solution
We immediately began working at a single story Credit Union that was devastated by the flood waters. Our services included demolition work to remove all contaminated materials, power washing the entire structure, detail cleaning, applying antimicrobial agents, and drying the building with our trailer-mounted dehumidifiers. Non-salvagable electronics with sensitive data were removed for destruction, while paper documents were freeze-dried for replicating at a later date. When this structure was being cleaned and restored, additional building owners asked for our assistance and we were able to redeploy technicians to a group of buildings which comprised about half of a city block.
Tenants in these buildings also had highly sensitive financial files, and they also requested that their contaminated computer hard drives be destroyed, and their paper files to be freeze-dried. Our restoration work in this building encompassed 23,000 square feet. At its peak, our 25 technicians were leading the efforts of dozens of additional local laborers. For more than a full work-week, we filled an industrial dumpster with debris at the rate of once per hour. Woodard also recovered more than $50,000 in deposits from a night drop, cleaning and returning them to the bank. Additionally, more than $3,000 of coins were recovered, cleaned and returned - with this amount being within one dollar of the total known by the bank.
With 130+ well-trained employees, the proper equipment, and fast mobility, Woodard is a proven resource for water, fire or smoke restoration project throughout the Midwest and Gulf Coast Regions.
