issue 015, 2020

Expert view

Q&A with Keith Pokorny, LEED AP, Regional Vice President, EFI Global, Inc.

edge:
Before we dive in, Keith, can you give our readers an overview of EFI Global, a subsidiary of Sedgwick?

Keith:
EFI Global is a leading provider of fire investigation, forensic engineering and environmental services here in the U.S., and around the world. With that global presence, we serve a variety of industries — in both the public and private sectors — through the largest staff of experts and a network of fully vetted contractors. We provide centralized response and deliverables that are specific to that client’s needs, and a single point of contact to oversee projects and meet service expectations. All that translates into unparalleled capacity and coverage, and niche specialization; for our clients, that means expedited turnaround times and a strong technical base of knowledge that saves them money.

edge:
How do things feel different for your team now, versus this time last year?

Keith:
It’s true that the workforce looks very different now than it did this time last year — or even just a few months ago. For us, services out in the field have changed dramatically; everything takes more coordination these days. And we’re doing a lot of health and wellness check-ins and temperature-taking.

In some instances things are a little easier for us — we’ve got more access to inspect and test properties that are vacant or much less occupied, so we don’t have to worry about being as disruptive to someone’s workday. And internally, our communication has really expanded; removing traditional barriers of branches into broader, service specific groupings. We find people are working together more easily, in a sustainable way.

But I can also speak to what hasn’t changed. Having come from the environmental side of things, I’m so glad to be with EFI (Keith joined the team in 2003), where it’s a truly consultative role, always has been. There’s a real synergy between the service lines here; where so many other multi-disciplined companies are siloed, our disciplines operate together.

As different as things look today than they did even a few weeks ago, or a few weeks before that, they’ll continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. We’ve had to learn to become much more nimble with how we work. We’re saying, “Okay, now we’re here; what do we need to keep doing to get to whatever is next?”

edge:
Where do things look different through the lens of COVID-19?

Keith:
Here’s one example. All around the country we’re being asked to come in and address industrial hygiene concerns within buildings’ HVAC situations. We’re helping determine scope and verifying that buildings are safe. In many places — prisons and schools, in particular — we’re looking at indoor air quality, going into the visitation centers to ensure there’s proper ventilation and that social distancing is possible — that’s new for us. We’re advising on not just ventilation, but all-new standard operating procedures. Technology innovations involving filtration and disinfection within building HVAC systems have been forced to evolve quickly in the pandemic. Most institutions don’t have the internal specialized expertise and manpower to ensure the combination of disinfection procedures, new technology installations and basic building ventilation systems are properly in place and ready to go as employees come back to work, kids come back to school and the general public gets back out in the world.

We’ll drill down, talk about safety and ventilation, review new technologies and whatever guidance is out there, determine what’s possible — and best — for a building. Our mechanical engineers work with facilities managers, either our clients’ own or an outsourced resource, to determine if ventilation is adequate — not just for COVID-19, but is it working the way it was designed to. A lot of folks are motivated to update their indoor air quality maintenance because of this heightened attention.

We're looking at indoor air quality going into the visitation centers to ensure there's proper ventilation that social distancing is possible

edge:
How have industrial hygiene and disinfection services amped up in the months since we learned about the coronavirus?

Keith:
As businesses and organizations are getting ready to reopen, there’s heightened anxiety, but also a greater awareness of the need for these crucial services. Our certified industrial hygienists are helping with planning efforts, performing coronavirus-related site testing, developing business-specific cleaning and disinfection protocols, providing disinfection contractor oversight, assisting with business preparedness — in many ways, this is exactly what our experts are trained to be prepared for, even if no one saw a pandemic like this coming. They’re used to providing environmental health and safety consulting services in places like hospitals, nursing homes, schools — so they understand better than anyone the risks and challenges.

There are also new technologies to disinfect building system’s supplied air through ultraviolet disinfection or ionization techniques to remove or destroy the virus. Evaluating the complex combination of the variety of disinfection processes, be it of the building systems themselves or through labor-based cleaning efforts, is a new challenge. The cost benefit to a local school system with 5-10 buildings is different than expanding those combinations out to a company’s 500 to 1,000 national locations.  

edge:
How does EFI’s approach and expertise cater to clients in an environment like this?

Keith:
In a lot of ways, EFI’s approach was ready-made to help handle this type of crisis. We take a much more forensic approach, rather than just coming in and saying we’re going to redesign your whole system — we’re more practical, and that makes us more affordable. Newer buildings have more automated systems; older ones have Band-Aids in place that may have been there for years. For many public buildings, there’s federal and emergency funding coming in. It’s the private side I worry about — retailers, for example, or other settings where they don’t own the building. A school is its own landlord. As someone’s tenant, you’re dependent on what they say they are implementing and trusting that it’s safe. So they’re hiring us to verify that the space is safe by, for example, verifying that a building’s HVAC system is changing out the air, filtering as it should. We can go in and audit, survey, give real-time instrument readings on what we find. The audit approach has really stuck because our clients are already spending money where they didn’t anticipate — we can keep costs down by auditing to find what’s broken, figure out what’s already running as it should, making more specialized repairs so they’re not just spending money across the board, where it won’t go as far.

Clients have been really happy with what our audits have found; we’re helping them prioritize what’s best for them to get ventilation to a sufficient level, whether that’s new equipment, different settings, etc. And we deliver our findings with a priority-based approach: immediate need, short-term fixes or upgrades, and longer-term capital replacement needs.

Because EFI does real-time instrumentation reading, when we’re in the field we can take action almost immediately; we’ll have a technician in making fixes and updates as soon as the day after we find an issue. One school we worked with recently hired an HVAC tech company to come in right behind us, so they’re fixing as we find — then we can go back and verify the standards are met. Audit, fix, verify. It’s a complete system.

edge:
As you’ve adapted to clients’ needs and requests related to the coronavirus, how has the EFI team integrated its services with new partners?

Keith:
In a scenario where someone in your facility tests positive, you have to take action. Sedgwick’s repair solutions team is our number one partnership right now, and we’re working alongside the contractors in that group all over the country. Working with our repair solutions partners, we’re able to help clients with a predictable process, one that keeps everyone aligned with expectations we have on our end. EFI’s process requires consistency with timeframe, turnaround, pricing, etc. By bringing repair solutions colleagues into a project with us, we can scope out a scenario and come up with a price range so clients aren’t paying one price in New York City and another in Kansas City. Stabilizing pricing on that population of contractors allows us to attack volume more predictably. Detailed protocol means we can give more accurate quotes up front. It’s like having our own internal contractors as part of the company.

edge:
Between our current COVID-centric environment and other environmental factors, what is having the greatest impact on EFI’s services?

Keith:
Communicating to our clients that we are out there, working every day — as we have been since March — has had the greatest impact on EFI for this very different year. Besides the pandemic’s impact on every aspect of our lives, there are still hurricanes, wildfires and social unrest events impacting our clients. Knowing we’re still operating as usual in response to CAT events is important to them; it enables our clients to also continue operating as close to business-as-usual as they can.

Wildfires are an area of service we’ve been addressing for years, particularly in California. For example, we may be asked to provide in-field testing to confirm if a claim is directly related to a wildfire event. Our in-house lab analyzes soot samples to distinguish wildfire damage, testing on the fringes where we can prove damage was or wasn’t related to the wildfire. After the repair solutions team comes through and cleans, we can come in right away to do post-remediation testing and get immediate results. That’s so important because cleaning after that kind of event is comprehensive and massive — it permeates every inch of a building.

I would also point out the in-field surface testing we’re doing now for COVID-19, where we’ve worked with labs to bring down pricing. Understandably, it’s hard to convince a client to take 10-15 test samples when it’s expensive to do so. By pooling samples together — testing a bunch of surfaces in one lab analysis — a business can cover much greater square footage. If the virus is present, you aren’t going to care which surface it was on — you’re going to clean them all. Then you can convey those test results, and the actions you took, to your employees, your customers, etc.

With all this new information, people are thinking down the road about logistics. Sure, you had a cleaning crew come in, but who’s checking the cleaning crew? Is there proper air changing in the building to remove the aerosols? There are so many factors. Our testing dispels those “what if” questions that are at the root of much anxiety.

edge:
What do you anticipate might change permanently as you look to the future, once COVID-19 is behind us? Any silver linings?

Keith:
Generally speaking, people are more clued into basic hygiene. Some folks might want to burn their masks by this point, but most of us understand more now the potential effects of being exposed and around so many others. Cold and flu season will have a whole new perspective this year. Realistically, we’re already waiting on the next virus even as we learn to deal with this one, and we’re already working to figure out how we can best prepare for that. How can we beef up our building systems when this is over and people and companies have more time to consider changes? How can we change layouts, adjust traffic flow, create more touchless moments? We need to be thinking about transmission, new risks, new technologies.

Indoor air quality has not always been top of mind — most folks are usually just responding to a complaint, like an odor — but I think looking at overall air quality and a building’s health ‘scorecard’ will become more proactive, more holistic. And obviously, that’s good for everyone.

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