Hello, my name is Martin Driskell. I am the General Manager of the Intercontinental Hotel in New Orleans. On Thursday, which was the 30th of July, we had a fire at 9:05pm. What happened was some sparks from the lint trap went down the floor, built up in a wall to the point where the heat caused the window to blow into the street across from us. And then the fire started burning up the side of the wall. Fortunately, the fire department arrived here with 70 men and over 30 trucks within 5 minutes and extinguished it.
Everything worked beautifully, the alarms worked beautifully. We evacuated all of the guests on time. Not a single person was scratched. And that’s 220 guests along with the 50 employees.
About 11 o’clock, 11:30 that night, we were able to get back in the building. And I went with the fire chief, did an inspection. By the time that I got back downstairs from the inspection, Andrew had already arrived from Computrols. And he came in with 3 of his men. And Andrew and the 3 of them, they worked all night.
Andrew went back to work and that was then Friday morning. He probably had about 2 hours of sleep along with his crew. Because of his efforts with Kevin and Todd and the rest of them, what they were able to do is call in a construction company. We had to run conduit all the way up to the 15th floor and he was able to get it working. I would have to say that after that 5 days working around the clock that our fire safety system is better than it had been before. So anybody that I can ever tell that story to and what a great service provider Computrols is. That night, their system worked flawlessly and they saved a lot of lives and a lot of property. So it’s with great pleasure that we will continue working with them for years. Thank you.
