What a Month That Was
The beginning of February was just too busy to do any more updates here with the spell of bad weather. We needed to double the staff on 24hr call out duties to try and cope with the demand for breakdown recovery. Of course we struggled like everyone else, not its being able to cope with the demand but the bad weather was stopping us getting to stricken motorists also.
As the police were telling all motorists to stay at home we were out there, trying to get around stricken vehicles and fallen trees. At one time we ourselves had to be rescued as one of the guys misjudged a corner and slip off into a ditch. Luckily the ditch was not that deep and after a tow from a friendly competitor and he was on his way again 30 minutes later.
Some of the national breakdown insurance companies gave us a ring on a few nights to help motorists that they could not get to, because of time. There was a real chance of catching hyperthermia and unprepared motorists ignored warnings and headed towards remote areas, armed only with a mobile phone, assuming that if they got into trouble, he would be the only call out. How wrong they were, with many waiting hours, until previous calls were finished first.
The national breakdown insurance companies also struggled, so rather than having at best unhappy customers and at worse, dead customers, they rang us and other breakdown recovery services to help get to some of their workload. One new programme quoted that demand was 40 times the normal and all emergency services were stretched and as usual the UK seemed to be less prepared than other countries, even though we knew it was coming.
The result was less staff in the garage and a few cars got fixed a bit later than planned, so a few complaints came our way, even though the customer had nowhere to drive and in fact should not have even picked the cars up with amount of snow on the roads. The roads even just outside of our garage was littered with future salvage projects as drivers thought they could get from A to B on the same time as before. As the media pounded us with images it seemed that eventually the message got through and many decided to stay at home, so the call outs gradually got less.
Category: Roadside