Winter Storm Cleanup PART 2

Michael Spaulding from Davey's Portland, OR office talks about what post winter storm tree work looks like for arborists, including how Michael and his team handled Portland's January 2024 winter storm. 

In this episode we cover:  

• What post storm work looks like for an arborist (0:39)
• Setting up priority (3:11)
• Powerlines (4:49)
• Being a counselor to clients (6:11)
• Insurance (8:41)
• Task priority management (9:54)
• Wrapping up the storm work (15:55)
• How it feels to help clients with storm cleanup work (17:07)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.

To learn about how to prepare your trees for winter storm season, read our blog, Your Backyard Tree Checklist for the Winter Storm Season.

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!

Transcript

Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know, "Trees are the answer."

This week, it's part two with Michael Spaulding. He's a district manager at the Portland, Oregon office of the Davey Tree Expert Company. We talked last week all about getting ready for a storm. Michael, this week, I want to talk about what you guys do after a storm. What's the first thing that comes to mind for you when the storm's over and you guys are headed out?

Michael Spaulding: Calls start coming in. We have to make sure before we go out that the conditions are safe. First off, the conditions must be safe so that we can come out and properly assess and that we don't become a victim ourselves. We don't want to go out in the middle of the wind and have a tree come down on us, branches fall on us. It's really imperative that safety key is first before we send our sales management teams out to do the BDA, the battle damage assessment.

Calls come in and then we start going out to these calls. We work with our local teams in the sales force to see who can pick up what calls and what zip codes and what areas and try to manage them as fast as possible. When we get on site, we're coming on site to somebody who is going through a mass catastrophe. A tree just came through their living room, through their house, through their garage. Water's coming in. They've never dealt with something like this. They don't know how to deal with something like this. Their emergency is the biggest emergency in the city, to their opinion.

A lot of times that can be accurate. A lot of times it just might be a tree on a fence. The tree on the fence will get handled in a couple of weeks. As soon as we get there, we meet with the homeowner real briefly. We really have to calm them down. Sometimes we're therapists, we're counselors. They've never been through a situation like this. To reassure them with a calm frame of mind that this is going to get taken care of, we're here to help, this is the process. Prep them for what they're to be expected in the entire process itself.

We then take a look at the property. We assess the damages that are going on. We make our notes. We take our photos. We collect all the data that we need for the job site. We look at everything from safety aspects, how is our team going to accomplish this, what tools do we need for the completion of the project? Proper execution of the order of this as well. Safety is absolute key. Getting in with equipment. Getting routed to these places may not be possible immediately because there's power lines down and there's not access to these. Roads are closed. Many things.

Doug: Is there a way to set up a priority through the calls or do you have to actually see the property first? Like you said, if it's a tree in a fence, it's a couple of weeks, but if it's through your roof and it's raining through your roof, how do you decide what is done first?

Michael: I've coined the term, I'm not the first person to do so, but I call this triage. We have to go in and it's like coming into an emergency room. There's all these accidents and problems in an emergency room. It takes that staff, a sales team, to assess all of these jobs and say, all right, well, here's a broken wrist and here's a broken femur that's compound fracture. This is high priority versus a common cold over here. We have to diagnose that as our sales team and then we have to put a plan together in order to get them to these jobs in the right efficient order to essentially stop the bleeding, stop the rain from coming in the home, protect their belongings.

We put that together after a full day, maybe even a half day out being on these calls. We are communicating to each other as a sales team, management team, talking about what we're seeing, where the damage is at, where the priorities are, possibly pulling crews off of one job to have them come over and extract this tree out of a home and tarp this up or just put a tarp over something initially to stop the bleeding on it. We plan our triage essentially that way through our sales team.

Doug: When these storms hit, one question I had was about power lines. I assume that the communication between your team and the electric company has to be-- How does that work so that you know, okay, it's safe to go into this neighborhood because there's no power there right now?

Michael: In some areas, there's a Davey surgery group that we can be in communication with. In certain territories, I've had those direct lines of communication. Really, our surgery groups are working with the municipal groups. Our residential team, we don't do anything around power lines. We don't do anything around electricity. Our teams know that. We educate our local RC groups, residential commercial groups, in proper line management, effective MAD distances. What to do if there's a downed line on the ground. It may appear offline, but of course, it's not. We have to treat it like it's live at all times.

There's a lot of job sites that we will get onto where the lines are down or crossing a driveway or over the back of a home where we are not able to manage that project. That's up to our sales team to follow that protocol and to make sure that our teams are safe at all times and that our teams that are working in the field know how to manage electrical hazard issues.

Doug: You mentioned something I thought was interesting is since you guys are on site and probably one of the first people on site, that part about being a counselor. I assume you learned that from being in the field because every person that you encounter, like you said, this is a mass disaster for them, but you've seen a hundred different disasters like this. Talk about how you, I guess, talk people down and get them to understand what needs to be done there.

Michael: I've been in the field since 2006. I've got about 18 years here in the field of working with the team. I was showing up working with customers that I was extracting the trees out of their homes at times. I've had experience dealing directly with them. When you're standing on somebody's king-size bed with their wedding pictures next to you and you're cutting logs out of their home and throwing it out their broken window onto the ground, it's traumatic for people.

I've always had a good sense of a calm mind in emergency situations, but having gone through so many of these, I've been a good coach and a leader to a lot of my sales teams about how to approach these types of situations and not becoming the victim, I think, is really key. They can bullnose in and demand this and expect this, but really, we have to be the ones that set the calm, first of all, and then set the expectations. You want to under-promise and over-deliver with them. Somebody that has, say, a tree on a fence, so to speak, I will come and see them. This is day one. Trees are through houses. It's crazy. It's mass chaos.

I have to let them know, look, this is low priority. It's not that you are a low priority. You are a very high priority, but somebody else has a tree through their home. It's Christmas Day. Their presents are smashed on the floor. They have to relocate. Thank goodness nobody was injured, but we have to manage that first. When you explain that to a customer that's got a tree on a fence in the backyard or leaning on their garage, no real heavy damage has gone down, they see that. They're human beings and they know that. There's just a smooth approach to counseling them in this emergency situation.

I think another really important emergency situation that comes up is dealing with their insurance. A lot of people have paid into homeowners' insurance 30 years and never had a problem, never had a claim. This is the first time that they're doing so. They need to be a little bit handheld and coached, reassured, about how those processes work. They have to know that it's going to take a little bit of time, but these are the proper steps.

As soon as we get this extracted, we're going to have the team out there tomorrow. We're going to have this extracted and tarped. I would be calling roofers right now, Mr. So-and-so. I would put them on the queue and let them know that this is going to be done tomorrow afternoon, and to schedule it for late in that afternoon or the following day. Get yourself in the queue because there's a thousand other people out here calling roofers right now. Get yourself on that list. This is the next part of the process, blah, blah. Here's what your insurance covers. Here's how it works. This is how you're taken care of. You really have to just draw the picture out for them and help them through that process.

Again, it's about quality versus quantity in these. You can overload yourself. There really is a thing that is called task priority management. There's a systematic approach to managing these tasks and not overwhelming yourself. Yes, you might have 20 tasks, and you have to reflect on what can you personally do in that amount of time that is reasonable to achieve a task without overloading yourself and spreading yourself too thin, not being thorough enough on stuff. You really have to know those limits within yourself and know how to cut those limits.

Maybe out of those 20 things, you can do 15 of them all at once, but you really need to narrow that down to more like 8 things and focus on doing quality on those 8 things. Once you knock those eight things out, you then can move on to the rest of those tasks. This is part of that triage process. You really need to stop those bleeders. You really have to communicate with this. You really have to coach these people. You really have to work with your team in terms of plans for the next day. You can't let all these things fall through the cracks. You have to really focus on quality over the quantity.

Doug: That sounds like great advice, but it sounds like hard to do. It seems overwhelming. Looking from the outside of what you're doing, it seems overwhelming to me because you do have so many different tasks to do. Talk a little bit more about that, about getting organized and having a checklist and all the like that. So that everything gets done and gets done right.

Michael: Day one, we've had an initial assessment. We understand the scope of the damage in the zip code. We know that it's from this city to this city or these neighborhoods are completely damaged. This is where the focus of all of our calls will be in the next upcoming days. We then come back after our day. We look at the jobs that we've seen for the day. We look at the available equipment that we have at the office at a local level, and we say, "Okay, we can prioritize these pieces of equipment. These are the numbers of equipment we have. These are the bodies that we have available." Then we assess, "Do we need help? Do we need outside help? Is this storm that large that this could call for outside help?"

For instance, are the hurricanes, right? We mobilize teams from all over the country to come in and help with hurricanes because there's a large swath of damage where those hurricanes and tropical storms end up pushing through the country. They leave a destruction path. You need a lot of hands on deck for that. We then assess that.

Day two, day three, I'm in communications with upper management on proper strategic planning for this. How many people, what kind of equipment? Really, those nuts and bolts come together in the coming days. In the meantime, we start prioritizing jobs that are the triage aspect of this, the real bleeders, the real problems that we need to address first. We put trees on fences off to the side. Any stump grinding that will happen, will happen a month or two out after the storm. We start organizing ourselves in the office and our available teams and our available equipment for the proper execution of the jobs, the completions.

Really, a lot of times, we're not completing a job the day that we come on site. We might come to your home that day. We might extract the tree off the house. We'll make it safe. We're going to leave the debris on the side of the home, but we're going to tarp it. We're going to get it safe. That way, the next phase of roofers or fencers or construction engineers can come in and safely assess their jobs that they have to do. We'll come back and clean up in a week or two. Then we build a plan of it becomes extraction, stopping the bleeding, extracting the trees, the real heavy lifting work happens. Then later towards the middle or end of that project, we then get into more of a true cleanup phase.

It's really important that we set those expectations with the clients from the point of meeting them on day one and explain how that process will work so that they understand and their expectations are set that they know that it's going to be a two, three-week process before we get to fine dial raking up and blowing off their property. That way, you don't have upset customers. You under promise, you over deliver, and you give them something that they expected already.

In a lot of cases, I tell somebody, "Well, we'll be here in about a two-week period." This is a tree on a fence. I happen to have a team working down the street finishing up an extraction project a week later or four days later. I say, "Okay, well, this is right down the street. Why don't you guys go over here and get this cut up and extracted and pulled out? You can actually complete this today." They might complete that two weeks ahead of schedule for what I had told that client. What this does is create solid communication.

Their expectations are met, exceeded, and beat. They get the services that they were promised faster and the deliverable is clean, smooth, and faster than expected. It helps create residual business down the road. It helps create trust in our services and our word for what we're doing.

Doug: Let's talk about how we end things.

Michael: Within those few weeks, knowing that those customers are still a week out from finish, throughout all of that process, I'm still emailing and communicating with my current clients and say, "Hey, I haven't forgotten about you. We're getting close to the cleanup phase. I just want to let you know that you're on the top of my radar. We're here for you and we'll be there." Just those little constant reminders, those little touches of communication. Sure, it's an extra email in this crazy busy platform you're dealing with, but it's imperative to the quality that we are delivering to these.

I stay in contact with everybody throughout the process. Then we come and we do the final cleanups. I set those expectations. The work orders set those expectations. They're well-communicated and the deliverable that they receive in the end is exactly what they expected and they've been communicated about. Then we wrap them up. If we have out-of-town crews, we plan those. It gets a little lighter and we'll send them home earlier possibly, but for the most part, that's how we wrap them up.

Doug: Before I let you go, tell me the good feeling, the feeling about, hey, we went onto this property, we fixed this tree, got it out of the house and everything. When everything's done, talk a little bit about those feelings.

Michael: I think really, first off, it comes to day one when I'm actually being a counselor to them in their moment of crisis. Being able to talk them off of this emergent moment, let them know that somebody is here for you, that we are going to get things taken care of. Seeing that immediate emergency situation come to a calm with them and see their trust and realization that they are in good hands with somebody who's honest and here to take care of them and for them to know that the confidence is there that they're going to be taken care of in the long and help walk them through those processes throughout the upcoming weeks.

That's where the beginning of the gratitude and reward comes in. Seeing them get restored their power and have their heat back on their home because we were able to respond so fast is another rewarding moment. Getting the teams through the entire process is also rewarding. It can be very tiring working 40 days straight as a district manager, but those hours that I put in and dedicate during this emergent time is key for the customers' care and their success and our crew's care and their success. It's really easy to get burned out in this. It's really easy. You really have to keep a PMA, a positive mental attitude.

Not only am I being a coach and a leader to our clients and customers that we're working with, letting them know that we're there, reassuring them that we've got this, reassuring them that life will be reestablished before you know it and it'll be over with and done with. Then also working with our internal teams, our crews, keep making sure that they have the things that they need, making sure that they're taken care of, making sure that they're taking the breaks that they need to take. That they're not overworked, that we do care. They are people. They are not machines. They have families. They have lives. We all have things to do.

Keeping them with a positive mental attitude is also really exciting to see a project come through successfully. This project in January, zero accidents, zero unhappy people. Everything went incredibly smooth. The success of a successful operation comes not only from management, but it comes from our sales team. It comes from the leaders we have in the field, the field staffs that we hire, that we rely on to make these judgment calls with these trees that are in insanely oddball condition with factors and forces that we don't see on a day-to-day basis. It really takes an entire village to make that come together. It's not a one-person show. It's really not.

It's amazing to see it happen. When you finally close the books on a storm and you start getting back to what normal days look like and people have their weekends back and are back to 8 hours versus their 12 or 13-hour days, it's nice to be able to step back and look at your entire team and the entire success that was brought out of that entire project.

Doug: Michael, it was great to hear your insights about this. It's absolutely fascinating. I really appreciate you sharing your story with me. Don't forget, this is part two. You've got to listen to part one from last week. Michael, thanks again. I appreciate your time.

Michael: Doug, thanks for having me again. It's been a pleasure.

Doug: It was great to hear Michael's insights from the field on what goes on after a storm comes through. Now, tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Do me a favor, subscribe to the podcast so you'll never miss a show. If you've got an idea for an episode, maybe a comment, there's a couple different ways to reach us. Send us an email to podcasts@Davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S @ D-A-V-E-Y.com. You can also click the link at the end of our show notes to text us a fan mail message and your ideas might be on a future podcast. We would love to hear from you.

As always, we like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, "Trees are the answer."

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