Water Damage: A Home Builders Nightmare

Constructing homes for residences across the United States is something we’ve been doing for quite some time. Enough time to have well-established systems in place for building new homes at a mass scale one community at a time. Having the ability to construct entire neighborhoods (or even pieces of them); is a great power that needs just as great a responsibility.

We just experienced a nightmare, and it comes from having somewhat a lack of responsibility and lack of supervision. But most of all, the system we thought was in solidly set in place failed; and we had no idea it even happened until it was too late.

This is quite a long story, but I’m going to try to get right down to it while still making it as educational as possible. A lot of our readers that subscribe to our offline magazine and monthly newsletter have gotten a glimpse of this already; and I know this is a very irregular story for our readers; it just got a lot of buzz from our subscribers. So we thought we’d share it for free with our “yet to subscribe” few.

$1,600,000 in Water Damage Repair Costs

One morning I woke up to a phone call a little earlier than I expected to wake up. It was 3:45 am my time when I got a shocking call from one of our foremen on the Eastern division of our company. I live in Las Vegas, so being on Pacific time and receiving a call that early from a foreman is never ever a good thing.

He tells me there’s a big problem and asks me if I’m sitting down. I cuss at him immediately telling him I’m laying in bed in the middle of sleeping what the hell is it?! He says we have about $1.6MM worth of damages that need repairing. Of course I immediately jump out of bed as if I were struck by lightening. This guy just told me I lost $1,600,000!
He goes on to tell me it was all because of a water leak that happened in over 20 finished houses on one of the communities we’re building.

You Said What?!

Now, just as you may be thinking, how the hell are 20 of our custom homes gonna have water damage in them at the same damn time! Well, it turns out that the plumbing company that was hired installed copper pipe that had.. wait for it… HOLES in the piping! To those of you that are newer to this stuff, this NEVER HAPPENS!

Well, the story gets a little crazier. These holes that were found in the copper pipes (of more than 20 houses!!) were made from a nitric acid mist that came out of a tank at the plumbing shops warehouse. They had the pipes laying on the ground nearby in the facility and so they got a little fine spray on them.

Now I’m no chemist, but supposedly nitric acid eats away at copper.

The Mistaken Judgement of a Selfish Foreman

The biggest concern for me was, well…

1. I can’t lie, the nitric acid mist story I heard from the plumbing company owner was a once in a lifetime experience for literally ANYONE in this space.

2. WHY was our inspection process skipped on this massive project!

The entire community we’re working on has over 75 total homes that we built. So when a project is even at 1 custom home, our inspection process can not be skipped! We have it specifically in our handbook to check each and every job ourselves. as well as watch our contractors inspect their own work. But guess what happened during the week of the plumbing installation? My foreman was out sick and had his NEPHEW take over for him! How absurd, and I hated doing it, but I had to let the foreman go, and he’s been with us for 4 years now.

The foreman was straight forward with me and let me know he was more concerned about his paycheck than the integrity of the work he was hired to do. None of this would have happened if the pipes were tested for leaks before the company left. This is standard operating procedure for any contractors work, as well as our own work for that matter. We can’t let these things happen again so we had to let him go.

Water Damage Restoration to the Rescue, but at a Price

We are a “household name” if you will in this space and we have many accounts that give us repeat business. The main reason it cost the $1.6MM is because we needed the repairs done as fast as possible; so no one caught whiff of this story anywhere. We went ahead and got in touch with our people at water damage restoration Las Vegas that are always on par with us in our Las Vegas community builds we do. They got us in touch with someone they knew can get the job done right for us over on the east coast. If it wasn’t for them, we’d be dead meat right now and our reputation would be toast.

They did a great job cleaning up and repairing the damage for us so it was well worth the money. Also, now we have a water damage connection in our eastern states. The owner was more than happy to give me a call and thank me for his business. I’m glad we got connected, but I’m still upset at the circumstances.

In this space, you never know what will happen next. It’s one thing after the other. And if you don’t keep a close eye on your guys and gals working for you across state lines; mistakes will happen much more often. Let this be a lesson learned for you; never take you eye off the ball until you have someone that can replace you within the organization. This was the last time for me, and now I’m on the hunt to find someone that can take over for me when I’m gone and not there to oversee things.