The Functionality is pleased to publish this article by our friend Kevin Brodkorb, an architect and contractor working in Denver, Colorado, the western edge of America's "tornado alley."  The enormous swath of agricultural land and prairie stretching from Eastern Colorado to Kansas, Texas to the Dakotas has always been famous for its violent storms: towering thunderheads roll off the eastern Rockies and cross the plains almost daily during late summer afternoons.  However, dangerous hail storms, lighting storms and tornadoes have increased in frequency with the recent advance of global climate change, in some cases causing the destruction of entire towns like Greensburg, KS (since rebuilt as a model sustainable community).  Kevin and others have endeavored to leverage digital and gps technologies to achieve greater efficiencies and customer service in the face of these disasters, helping to fill increased demand for repair services that these storms cause. 

  Thunderhead over Denver, CO (Photo credit: Tom P. Beresford)Last year Colorado had one of the most damaging summer storm seasons in over two decades.  Our small locally based roofing company in Denver struggled to keep up with the increase in roof work and we faced serious competition from “fly by night” contractors looking to make quick deals in the area.  We needed much faster tools to both measure and estimate the costs of each roof we repaired, so we began to investigate satellite and aerial photography as a way to measure roofs. We developed software that uses these images to automatically generate scaled roof plans, and with a little artistry and experimentation, we were soon able to provide an accurate material takeoff for a roof within a tolerance of one percent of actual required quantities.  Our software includes functionality for designating colors and slope for each different type of roof element (hip, ridge, eave, etc.) and parses their total measurements automatically into a takeoff which can be used to directly estimate costs.  

Satellite Roof Area plan and material takeoff
A major problem in the roofing industry comes from “fly by night” contractors who arrive in a city after a storm, repair roofs, and then ship out, leaving the customer with no one to contact if their roof fails.  Our goal is to combat that negative stereotype by staying put in Denver with a permanent contactable location and to deploy our new software to measure and estimate roofs on a scale that is potentially global in reach.  Our second goal is to utilize local resources and hire local contractors in each region we enter.  Using local resources not only insures a more sustainable business model, it also provides jobs to local knowledgeable contractors instead of flooding the market with foreign contractors as with most “fly by night” operations.

Current global weather patterns also continue to grow in intensity and these storms are having larger and more prolific impacts on urban centers.  Having the ability to stay put in Denver and provide roof measurements hours after a storm hit 1000 miles away allows us to keep up with growing demand.

(Article Courtesy Kevin Brodkorb)