The office flooded on Tuesday. Got the call at 8:45am. A fire on the third floor above us. Sprinklers and SFD water hoses. And water gushing through the ceiling tiles and onto everything we've worked hard to accumulate and maintain to run our businesses. Devastating. And now happening for the third time.
Most all is well. No one was hurt or killed. Things can be replaced, repaired. We have insurance. Life and work, thankfully, will go on. I am grateful, but this recent episode got me and a friend of mine thinking: what are pictures worth in a moment like this?
Friends, they are priceless.
Every one grabs shots when the shit hits the fan. Hell, even the ServePro people were taking photos with their phones during their short-lived clean-up (too expensive for Corporate, so they pulled them off the job). We were all frantically grabbing shots of the ruins of our equipment, the soggy ceiling tiles disintegrating all over our precious professional belongings. I found my beloved camera, the money-maker of my business, standing in a pool of water on top of my particle-board-constructed desk. It is no longer serviceable. These are definitely times to capture the damage visually.
But now I will show you a more excellent way.
Document. Document what is valuable to you. Whatever that is. Have a digital copy and a print copy in a safe, water- and fire-proof place. If it makes you money, take photos of it. The insurance company will need to see the item as it was as well as damaged. Better yet, have a professional do it for you! The higher the quality of those photos, the harder it will be for the claim to be denied. Don't trust your livelihood to fuzzy, blurry, too-dark or too-washed-out photos.
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