Tropical Storm Irene

In late August the weather man started to predict a possible hurricane headed our way. It’s been years since we’ve had an actual hurricane. I think Bob was the last one. Well, Irene certainly did hit us, although with only tropical storm winds. I can only imagine the damage that would have occurred if Irene had maintained her hurricane force. As it was, at Q-Team came to work the “morning after” to over 60 voice mails (and that’s before 7:00 am). Our power was out and our phones were out. The women in the office had to use their persnal cell phones to constantly check our voice mail and return calls. Ray Stanford, of Stanford Electric got us hooked up with a generator in no time. By the end of the 2nd day, we had our power back but our phones went out completely. People couldn’t even leave us a message for about 2 hours. It turns out that Time Warner was down all over New England. Our employees were great, everyone stepped up and put in a lot of hours. We had 3 men out doing estimates and directing crews from 7:00 am to 9:00 pm for over a week. We used our 2 rear-mount bucket trucks, we pulled our old orange “pumpkin” bucket truck out of storage and we rented a 4th material-handling bucket truck to help us through the first week. We pulled numerous trees off houses, garages and driveways (and a few that were getting ready to fall on them). Point Sebago (a long-time Q-Team customer) was one of the hardest hit. Now, 3 weeks later, we have finished most of the heavy-duty storm damage work (although a few keep trickling in) and we are down to doing mostly secondary storm related work and our normal work. As you can imagine, we had a back-log of jobs lined up prior to the storm and those customers, in general, have been great. Very understanding. We would like to thank our employees for their good work and our customers for their patience. Thanks again.