Had to close the store last night due to water damage in the store.
Came to the store to drop some supplies off around 1 pm and found the front of shop (dining and counter area) under about 1/2 inch of water. I thought the fire sprinklers must have come on or something.
What happened is that someone (the shopping centre cleaner or vandals) got into the fire hose cabinet between my store and the Fish & Chips store next door and either left the tap running (cleaner uses it for washing down the walkway outside the shopping centre) or vandals got in and turned it on. :x
Either way water flowed into our shop. The fish & chip shop owner heard water running and turned it off at just before 1pm … god only knows how long it was running for.
As the other shop has a tiled wall his side (deep fryers etc along the wall) the water was forced back to our side (plasterboard wall) resulting in water damage to our walls. The flooding also knocked out half of our power from under floor cables being emersed in water.
Guess what the power went to? Cool room, prep bench, frezzers, oven, till and phones.
We got power to the coolroom and freezers by running extension leads all over the place from power outlets that were unaffected, plus emergency power outlet from the shopping centre. With leads running everywhere it was too dangerous to open the shop for trading.
By the time we got cleaned up and power operating again without the switch tripping off it was about 5.30pm so we closed for the night. Dropped about $1200 in sales for the night 
Luckily insurance covers all the damage plus our loss of trade for the night and wages for fulltime staff that had to be paid, and any lost stock.
All we have to do now is get builders in to replace the walls right along one side of the dining area, get a sparky to re-position the wiring and then a painter to do his job. Have to get a cabinetmaker out to look at the counter as water went under there and looks as if there may be water damage, requiring a new counter (only 16 months old).
Had the night off which was OK as I’ve been doing 7 days shifts as I haven’t been able to replace the manager who left us suddenly a few weeks back.
My insurance broker often commended me about the high level of insurance I took out (especially as he got good commission out of it 
) but in times like this it really paid off. The insurance company gave the go ahead to my broker to get everything and anything needed to be fixed and aren’t even sending an accessor to check it out.
In the end of the day it pays to have good insurance that covers all aspects like loss of trading, wages, robbery, vandalisim, any type/cause of water damage etc. We pay around $3.5K per year and in times like this it is well worth the money.
Back to the grindstone tonight, with a really super clean floor.
Dave
