A Story of Emergency Reactive Maintenance & Yorkshire Puddings

When you are running one of the busiest restaurants in the UK, a building emergency is never just inconvenient It can put your biggest trading day of the week at risk. That is exactly what happened recently at a carvery we look after in south london, when a small damp patch beneath a booth developed into a major underfloor leak.

Thanks to the rapid response of our team at AM Planned Maintenance, the restaurant was able to stay open and continue serving its Sunday lunch crowd. Here is how it unfolded.

1st September: The first sign of trouble appeared when staff noticed that the carpet beneath one of the booths was damp. At first it was believed to be the result of a leak from the ceiling above.

2nd September: One of our engineers attended the site on a P2 priority call. After carrying out an inspection, a quotation for remedial work was generated. The following day the quote was accepted, and we arranged to carry out the works overnight on 5 September.

5th September: Once our engineers began the job, it became clear that the problem was far more serious than expected. The leak was traced to not the ceiling above but to pipework running through the concrete floor below the booth. Our over night crew got to work stripping back the booth and making a start on chiselling out the concrete to expose the damaged pipework.

6th September: At 5am, it became clear to our crew that the job was becoming a real monster and would need further work and the restaurant wouldn’t be able to reopen for business.  For the carvery, this was a major blow. It was a Friday morning, the start of a busy weekend, and their ever-popular Sunday lunch service was just around the corner. We now had a firm deadline: everything had to be repaired, rebuilt and ready for 11am on Sunday morning. The pressure was on, but our team thrives in these situations. Challenge accepted.

Over the next 48 hours our crew worked like demons on site. We started by cutting through the concrete floor and exposing the pipework. Here we found several badly leaking pipes all of which needed to be replaced urgently. With the restaurant closed we were able to replace the damaged sections of pipe, remove the water damaged concrete and rebuild the floor back up to its previous level. By the early hours of Sunday morning, we had the floor completely rebuilt, the booth seating back in place and the carpet drying.

The timing could not have been tighter. At 10:15am on Sunday morning, the final pieces of work were completed and the restaurant was ready to reopen just in time for its busiest service of the month. By 11am the doors were open, the carvery was serving, and a few of our engineers were already in the queue – this time waiting for Yorkshire puddings instead of leaking pipes.