Calls for repairs flood local contractors

It hasn’t been raining only outside: Phone calls are pouring into businesses that repair storm damage to buildings.

“It’s just insane — insane. We’ve had more than a hundred calls a day,” said David Reid, co-owner of Family Roofing in Columbia, Md. His business normally receives five to eight calls a day on minor repairs. Now he is getting calls about falling roofs and cascading leaks every hour of the workday.

Since rain and storms struck neighborhoods this week, his business and others in the Washington area have been flooded with repair requests. Now, business owners must juggle their workers so they can respond to multiple requests.

“A lot of times, you can’t get to everybody because there’s so much demand,” Mr. Reid said. “You try to do with the worst-case scenarios first. You have to make the priorities first.”

“Like, if someone says, ‘If there’s anybody who could come right now, it’s coming into my bedroom and there’s a water flow.’,” he said.

Small businesses that don’t have large staffs may feel the brunt of the huge demand. So it might be necessary to respond to existing customers first, said Melissa Hunt, office manager of Affordable Stump and Tree Removal in Springfield.

“Doing all of it is really hard unless you have a really big business. We’ve got to do the best we can. You can only get to so many calls a day. [People] are looking for the first guy who can show up with a chain saw in their lawn to take care of business,” she said. “We’re trying to take care of our current customers.”

Answering so many people’s calls can be a bit overwhelming, said Ashley Bee, administrative assistant at McConkey & Keane Inc. roofing and contracting in Beltsville.

“We’re swamped. We’re getting so many phone calls from people to come out right away,” said Ms. Bee, who sounded exhausted on the phone midday yesterday. “Everybody is in a rush, and they’re just thinking they are the only ones that [have buildings] leaking.”

Ms. Bee said the business is receiving almost 30 calls a day about plugged-up gutters and broken skylights, compared with the normal eight.

This means about three times as much potential to make money.

Mr. Reid said some roofing companies charge up to $200 just to come to a caller’s house and inspect the damage. And companies can charge anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000 to fix or replace roofs, he said.

Some businesses are changing their schedules and rules just to answer to the volume of calls. Kareen Deberry, assistant office manager of Kuhn’s Tree Service in Silver Spring, said phone calls have doubled.

“The phone usually starts ringing at 6 a.m., when nobody is here,” she said. “We usually don’t work in the rain, but on Monday and Tuesday our crew had to because it was an emergency. [Callers] had trees on their houses.”

“We’ve only done emergency work. For right now, we have to. And our customers are understanding of it,” she said.

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