LA Fitness Stairs

2/10/2020 (Permalink)

Leg Day at SERVPRO of Chino/Chino Hills

Los Angeles is a big place.

So big, in fact, that LA County is home to more than 1% of the entire population of the United States (more than 3,900,000 to 329,000,000, according to a 2019 census conducted by the United Nations). With that many people, businesses like grocery markets, gyms, and restaurants in high-traffic areas are constantly buzzing with patrons. Many places stay open 24 hours a day or are, at the very least, open for much of the day to accommodate everyone’s busy schedules. Things move very fast in Los Angeles County, because they have to.

Recently, SERVPRO of Chino / Chino Hills was contacted by an LA Fitness branch in the city of Glendale, about 8 miles outside of Hollywood. The location had experienced a major pipe failure in the upstairs women’s locker room / sauna; water had soaked through not only the ceiling tiles but had made its way down the walls, into the floor, and into the basketball court and spin-cycle class below. The only sections left unaffected by the leak were the weight equipment area, and the upstairs cardio area. The management staff was clearly upset by this, and they requested that we address the problem as swiftly as possible. Two on-call technicians were dispatched immediately to assess the site and begin the drying process the same night.

The following day, two trucks were dispatched to the site to assess the situation more thoroughly. I myself was present, along with three technicians. Our mission, had we chosen to accept it, was to identify all of the affected areas and weigh the likelihood of restoration versus demolition and reconstruction. Before we left the office, one of the technicians had described the location to me, informing me that this was going to be a particularly… physically demanding job. He told me that he and the other tech were unable to get as much done as they normally would have been able to due to there being “a lot of stairs”. I had imagined a staircase similar to what you would normally see at a gym of LA Fitness’ caliber which is ten or so stairs up, a landing, and then ten more stairs leading to the second level.

This was inaccurate.

We arrived to a bustling downtown area with no parking spot in sight, which is to be expected in Los Angeles. We parked a block away and walked to the site. After actually seeing the business, I now understood what the challenge was. While I was correct in my assumption of there being stairs from the bottom to top floor inside of the gym, I had sorely underestimated what “a lot” of stairs was. The gym was on the second floor in a bazaar / outside market. The stairwells leading up to the second floor was roughly 30 stairs, give or take a few. That being said, stairs are no match for the technicians of SERVPRO of Chino / Chino Hills. We hauled dehumidifiers and air movers into the gym, traversing the stairs back and forth and getting in about a year’s worth of cardio in the process.

The leak had damaged quite a bit of material. After testing and marking the appropriate spots for demolition, we packed up and departed. While sitting in the truck, one of the technicians looked over at me and laughed. I asked him what was so funny, and he just shook his head. I kept asking why he was laughing and he finally said “There was an escalator on the backside of the building”.

I take solace in knowing I did not skip leg day at the gym that day.

Los Angeles is a big and fast place, but SERVPRO of Chino / Chino Hills is ready for anything. We are here to help 24/7, 365 days a year.