Davey Tree Flipbooks

6 THE DAVEY BULLETIN | November/December 2019 The residents, trees and power lines of Florida and much of the southeastern U.S. dodged a bullet when Hurricane Dorian lumbered dangerously close to the coast in September, skirting much of Florida and Georgia only to deliver a glancing blow to the beaches of the Carolinas. Early on, the storm looked to deliver a devastating landfall in the U.S. after it had destroyed two major islands in the Bahamas, leaving whole island communities ruined beneath the matchstick-like remnants of homes and businesses blown down by the Category 4 hurricane. Scott Anderson, project developer, Davey Resource Group, was among the first to mobilize for the storm response. Anderson and his fellow DRG employees were tasked on Labor Day weekend with organizing the out-of-town crews arriving in advance of the storm. Their goal: get started immediately with recovery efforts after it passed. "Our initial response was to assist with helping manage the staging sites in Lake City, Florida, at the fairgrounds and at Daytona International Speedway, the racetrack," Anderson said. "There were 90 employees called from DRG, but 70 who were called to respond to the Orlando Utilities Commission didn't actually work. They all were turned back, and their duties were to be damage assessment crews going out immediately after the storm to provide analysis of the damage to the system. It never happened." The storm, thought to strike Florida's east coast, made a last-minute turn north. Johnny Page, operations manager, Gulf Region, Eastern Utility, serves clients largely in the central and west coast areas of Florida and, like most everyone else, anticipated a big storm. In the end, there were zero impacts to his clients. "Most of my crews did not even participate," Page said. "It was pretty much a large exercise of getting ready." Ultimately, a total 350 local Davey employees responded with an additional 250 Davey employees coming from out-of- town locations, bringing Davey's total response to Hurricane Dorian in the Southeastern U.S. to about 600 employees. Where they provided the most help was to the Orlando Utilities Commission, New Smyrna Beach, Kissimmee Utilities, City of Ocala and City of Lake Worth accounts. "We had a lot of clients call for crews, but then we had a bunch of cancellations," said Keith Horn, area manager, Gulf region, Eastern Utility. "Because the storm pretty much stalled out it was just some wind damage and limbs down, nothing major. We were fortunate with that side of the storm not making landfall. But it was a hustle on the buildup." The storm did hit parts of North and South Carolina, where Steve Clawson, operations manager, Mid-Atlantic region, Eastern Utility, dispatched crews to Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Six crews spent a week there on storm cleanup duties. Crews from both Davey and Wolf Tree, Inc., a Davey company, responded. Crews from the Easley Combined Utilities account, Newberry Electric Cooperative account and Wolf Tree crews from Tennessee all supported recovery efforts. "We prepared. Our client Duke Power mobilized a lot of crews and put them on standby for a day or so, but we didn't have to go do any work," Clawson said. "It was not near what they thought it was going to be. We sent a few crews to Florida and then brought them back. Thankfully it wasn't as bad as it could have been." In Canada, 13 employees responded to support the city of Halifax's storm clean up and power restoration efforts. They spent two weeks clearing streets and structures of debris. MISSION Davey Canada crews respond to Hurricane Dorian clean up work in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Employees who responded included: Jacob Braun, Kyle Cline, Jesse Cooke, Darren Corbelli, Ryan Creary, Tyler Hall, David Materiuk, Jordan Milmine, Zack Ogarmans, Nic Picard, Alison Stanton, Warren Stavert and Derek Thorne. HURRICANE DORIAN OFFERS EXERCISE IN PREPARATION

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