Strategic Planning Pays Off for ADS During 2021 Colorado Wildfire
Years of strategic planning, including fortification of the station to withstand natural disasters, and the acquisition of an additional central station through the purchase of Safe Systems Inc. (SSI), left ADS well positioned to service its customers through the worst of the disaster.
Although an alarm company’s main purpose is to mitigate risk and offer rapid communication and response to its customers, sometimes even the most careful planning fails during an unprecedented disaster. That’s what happened on Dec. 30, 2021, when wind gusts exceeding 100 miles an hour brought the most damaging fire in Colorado’s history and forced the evacuation of the Alarm Detection Systems Inc. (ADS) central station in Louisville, Colo. But years of strategic planning, including fortification of the station to withstand natural disasters, and the acquisition of an additional central station through the purchase of Safe Systems Inc. (SSI), left ADS well positioned to service its customers through the worst of the disaster.
An operation plan established five years before played a pivotal role in working through the disaster. Developing the ability to switch monitoring from one station to another required intense employee training and interoperability testing. Software, operating vocabulary, and best practices all had to be aligned for the proper station redundancy to work.