When staff of the Suncrest Dental Group returned to work Wednesday morning after a long weekend, they were met with a scene that could stand up next to footage from a tropical storm.
This was no tropical storm, however. The pipes of the dental office were another victim of the weekend’s freezing temperatures.
Water dripped from collapsed areas of the ceiling. Floors were swollen in some places and collapsing in others. Debris could be seen all over equipment. Paint pulled from the walls and water-logged ceiling tiles laid broken in every room of the building – and that was just the tip of the melted iceberg.
It quickly became clear the dentists would not be able to see patients anytime soon.
“This is worse than we ever imagined,” said owner Dr. Timothy Sines, who believes the breakage happened sometime Saturday or Sunday as that is when the systems were last shown to be active.
All three floors of the building will need to be gutted, Sines said. And while the amount of damage has not yet been determined, he said it was certainly a total loss of “well over $1 million.”
WV Rebuilders — a damage restoration service — had crews on scene Thursday helping with clean-up of the three-story building, but Sines said the building was not his main concern right now. His priority was finding a temporary location for the office’s 3,000+ patients and 14 staff members.
“The patients are the most important thing, so we are trying to find a place so at least their needs can be met. This can be rebuilt and there are a lot of people in the state going through a lot worse than this,” he said. “We just want people to know we are doing everything we can to get back up and running as quickly as we can.”
Currently, the dental office is limited in how it can get word out to patients as all of the computers and other record-keeping systems were damaged. Staff are working to get the computers and servers back up so patient communication can resume but that hasn’t happened yet.
“We have no phones or computers, and we are just trying to get the word out that we’re still here, we’re coming back. Just give us a little time,” Sines said.
