July 7, 2008 - Facilities Management
Nobody ever expects a tornado to rip through downtown Atlanta, but on the evening of March 14, that’s exactly what happened. With little warning and winds up to 130 miles per hour, the twister left a six-mile swatch of damage in its wake.
The 18-story Hurt Building is one of Atlanta’s oldest skyscrapers and is located in the heart of the city. For months, Jeff Fears with Harbor Group Management had been looking for some way to notify his tenants of incidents without using the fire alarm. Only a week before the tornado hit, Fears had distributed the GuideSafe tenant management and notification system to his tenants. GuideSafe is a Web-based tenant notification system. It allows building managers to alert occupants in real time via text, e-mail and a Web portal about disruptions and emergencies.
When the tornado hit, it blew out the windows in the restaurant in the bottom of the Hurt Building as well as those in several offices. Using GuideSafe, Fears notified his tenants of the tornado hit and which offices had been damaged. GuideSafe provides a simple checklist showing the companies in the building and Fears checked which tenants he wanted to notify.
With contact information right in the system, Fears and his team were able to keep the tenants notified as needed. “I didn’t want people tying up the phone lines with non-emergency calls asking for updates on the building,” he says. “The notifications and the Web portal in GuideSafe kept my tenants up to date on the situation.”
Another benefit to GuideSafe was that all of the building’s emergency procedures were available on the system and could be viewed by any of his tenants accessing GuideSafe right from their desktop. Fears could also e-mail a synopsis of the procedures to his tenants with the complete procedure attached to the message along with any maps showing evacuation routes or other procedures.
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