RSS FeedFire leads to busy weekend for East Midlands Regional Manager
A trip to school to pick up his lad led to a busy weekend for Regional Manager Paul Massam as the School was on fire and the fire brigade were on site.
45 minutes after arriving at Cherry Willingham School to collect his son, Paul found himself in the thick of things, placing emergency orders for materials and plant to cordon off and make the area safe. More Gelder Group staff arrived to help at 6.30 pm but the fire wasn’t extinguished until 10.30 pm.
Paul and his team were back on site at 6.30 am the following Saturday morning to commence with the cleaning up operation, an operation that lasted all weekend with additional works of restoring power supplies and the boarding up of windows.
Monday was then spent organising portable classrooms, meeting loss adjusters and structural engineers as the full extent of the fire was realised. Initial estimates put the cost of the emergency works, temporary classrooms and reinstatement at £750,000.
Reflecting on the past few days, Paul commented “I’m shattered but at the same time proud of the way our team responded. During the space of one weekend we completed £30,000 of emergency works, placed £70,000 of orders for demountable classrooms, communicated with teachers, the fire brigade, loss adjusters and structural engineers and got the school back open – much to the disappointment of my son!”
The Gelder Group’s emergency response team complete hundreds of emergency call outs annually, few on this scale and few that involve mobilising a team as large as were mobilised on this one.
