More Storm Damage

We're having a banner year for storm damage here in Ohio. So far this year, we've had 3 major events. First was hurrican Ike which rolled through Ohio earlier in the year with hurricane force winds and did a lot of damage to the area, including minor damage to a few of my rentals. Then, a couple of weeks ago, we had a major ice storm drop more than an inch of ice on the area. This damaged a lot of trees and resulted in relatively minor damage to some of my property and some of the neighbor's property (when my trees fell on their property and downspouts were ripped from my buildings). Then, last night we have very strong winds go through the area. I don't know how strong they were, but they damaged the shingles on the roof at my home (which were probably weakened by ike) and they pulled the post that held our basketball backboard right out of the ground. That was a 4 inch steel post set in 2 feet of concrete! To my amazement, I didn't receive any reports of significant damage at any of the rentals.

The other issue that occurred as a result of the storm was that my security cameras went offline. They are still working and recording, but I just can't watch the action from home via the internet. So, I went to the storeroom at the Pink Elephant to see what the problem was. After going through the diagnostic, I determined that the DSL service was down and I called the service provider. They will be sending out a technician - hopefully tomorrow.

Finally, I had two small maintenance issues today. The first issue was a leaking trap under the kitchen sink of one of my two bedroom apartments. That was literally a 5 minute fix. The next issue was a ceiling fan that the tenant reported was sparking. I told the tenant to turn it off and not use it until I arrived. To my surprise, the tenant was correct and sparks were flying when the fan blades would reach certain points in their rotation. To be honest, I didn't look any further to see what was wrong as I'm taking out all ceiling fans anyway. Ceiling fans are too complicated for rentals (tenants) as evidenced by a recent lawsuit I read about in which a tenant was bouncing on the furniture and lost an eye when struck by the ceiling fan blade. Anyway, I removed the fan and replaced it with a builder's quality light (less than $6 at Lowes).

That was it for work today and then I came home to look at my own damaged roof. I have a contractor coming to look at it tomorrow and then I'll decide whether we'll turn it in to the insurance.