Servpro Fire & Water-Cleanup & Restoration was almost as swamped by business Monday as its customers were by flooded basements.
“Right now, we’re so busy I hardly have time to talk to you,” said Patti Brown, who owns three franchises -- in Decatur, Clayton and Henry/Spalding County — and on Monday had seven crews working 24-hour shifts.
“I just got off the phone with a woman in Decatur whose house was flooded by a rising creek,” she said.
Flooding in metro Atlanta meant jammed phone lines at some area companies that handle water-logged basements, tree removal and disaster recovery.
Brant Howard, the vice president of sales and marketing for Servicemaster by Bailey in Canton, said his Monday call volume was easily double a typical work day.
He had every available worker — about 20 – trying to stop water damage at client homes. He said crews would work well into the night to cover all the calls. They were pumping out water and removing soaked sheetrock, insulation and carpets.
“Those things have to come out or you run a risk of bad situation, like mold,” he said. Basement flooding was the biggest issue, he said.
At metro area Home Depot stores, especially in Douglasville and Powder Springs, there was a run on bottled water and bleach because of a boil water advisory, said J.T. Rieves, the Home Depot regional vice president over the Mid-South region, including Atlanta and North Georgia.
A hospital bought the Douglasville store out of bleach, he said.
Last week, he said, he had ordered more bleach due to the threat of increased H1N1 flu.
“It’s better to be lucky than good sometimes,” Rieves quipped.
The company has a distribution center in McDonough stocked with supplies in case of hurricanes, he said, so he expected new shipments quickly. He said most Atlanta stores would be restocked with water and bleach by Tuesday.
Other sold-out items included pumps and wet vacs to remove water.
“People are buying every kind of pump you can get your hands on, including the kind you would use in a decorative pond,” he said. More pumps were on their way from Wisconsin, he added.
Next, he said, it’s “wait and see” what will be needed to repair homes. But with more rain on the way, it wasn’t yet clear what he would be ordering.
One lucky thing for Atlantans is that the storm didn’t blow in with strong winds, said Chris Comer of Chipper LLC, a tree removal service in Alpharetta.
“If there’s a big wind or a strong front that pushes it out on Wednesday,” said Comer, “things are going to get hectic. . . . there’s giong to be a lot of trees falling.”
On Monday his two three-man crews were mostly taking down trees that were “heaving” -- leaning over with roots pulling out of the ground -- or had already fallen across lawns or driveways. He saw few trees on houses, he said, crediting the storm’s non-gusty nature.
“But it’s soggy,” he said. “The fact the ground is rain soaked is causing trees to give way.”
His crews were waiting until the rains subsided to cut trees up because with the soggy ground, it would destroy lawns. “We can’t even walk without our feet sinking in the ground,” he said.
Servpro’s Brown said the flooding is the most widespread she’s seen in her 10 years of drying out homes and basements across the metro area.
“I remember a few years ago, they had five inches of rain in parts of Gwinnett County,” she said. “That was bad. But it was just in one part of the city. This is everywhere.”
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