It was Christmas Eve when Lesley Lane, director of property management for Greenwood Development, received a phone call from a tenant of The Greenwood Building.
That person had stopped by the building and saw what appeared to be a leak.
“She walked into the main lobby and said it looked like it was raining from the ceiling,” Lane said.
When Lane walked in, water was coming into the first-floor lobby through the ceiling, water was pouring from the elevator shafts and rushing down a set of stairs.
“We found where three fan coil units, which heat and cool our building — the copper lines on those fan coil units busted due to the cold weather. We then found a fourth unit that the lines busted on the fifth floor, so four total units,” she said.
All of the units that were damaged were on the west side of the building. What they think happened, Lane said, is the wind coming from the west on Christmas Eve slid over the top of the building at Flynn’s on Maxwell and only hit the west side.
Once staff was on site, water was turned off for the affected units and the cleanup began. And while most people were getting ready for or already partaking in Christmas festivities, Lane’s staff worked through the night and returned on Christmas Day. Servpro assisted in cleanup and wrapped up its work last Wednesday. Altogether, six floors were affected, from the fifth floor down to the basement.
Almost half of the tenants were displaced, but Lane said 16 were helped in getting relocated, while the others are able to work from home.
“We’ve been fortunate to help tenants find other spaces. We have an incredibly strong team who have helped move tenants’ items, provided storage space to 20 or more tenants, etc.,” she said.
Tenants will not have to pay rent while they are displaced and tenants who think the building isn’t the best solution for their business anymore have been offered to be released from their leases without penalty.
“We want to make sure that regardless of how this affects us, we want to do the right thing by the people we do business with every day. That’s what’s important to us,” she said.
To say it was disruptive is an understatement, but as Lane stressed, it could have been much worse. However, the frigid weather sparked conversation about how to prevent something like this from happening again.
“I don’t know if we could ever prevent something like this from happening again. What we can do and have done is we have started crafting some policies and procedures to ensure that when we experience extreme weather like that, that we have someone in the building several times through that weather event even if it’s just for a 30-minute walk-through to make sure everything is okay because we want to catch it sooner,” she said.
Tenants will remain displaced for at least two more months, but Lane said the hope is that within the next 10 days, people will begin the “put back” process, making sure the building is clean, healthy and beautiful.
“My goal is to do the reconstruction in a strategic way to make sure the most number of our tenants are able to get back in first. What that looks like for us is – our second and third floors make up the bulk of our tenants. Between those two floors, we probably have about 35 tenants. I do not imagine that will happen before April,” she said.
