Infostructure offices burn down, but business was not impacted and now they want to rebuild + housing.
Jeff Rhoden, co-owner of Infostructure, a phone company based in Talent, Oregon ordered the evacuation of his office once he saw the plume of smoke in Ashland, where he lives, just to be safe. He wanted to make sure his tech team could get out safely, and he told everyone not to worry about grabbing stuff, they could return to work the next day.
He received a text from a friend that “snuck back” to Talent to get guns from the home he was evacuated from hours earlier. The text was a photo of the office fully engulfed in flames. Jeff knew that the phone operations were fine and didn’t worry about disruptions in service, or the building, “It’s just stuff”. He was happy that all his employees were safe and he felt bad for everyone else effected by the fire. He had one employee who lost his home and Jeff spent the days after the fire, relocating his tech team into a church attic office space that his brother owns and taking care of rehoming his employee. When I asked Jeff about the future, he told me about plans to try and develop mixed use space to put some apartments and make the buildings they owned multiple stories.
Co-owner Scott Hansen told me “Losing our two buildings and everything inside is certainly a great loss.
However we are blessed with good insurance and now it’s just a matter of going through the process and learning how this world works.
Luckily our great technical team had most everything “in the cloud” so our critical services to our customers were not affected.
InfoStructure will be fine in the end.
My heart goes out to the thousands that the lost their homes, one of our employees (Levi Doty) being one of them.
And specifically the stories I’m hearing of those that didn’t have insurance – that’s where my heart breaks.
The outpouring of generosity in our community and beyond has been amazing and uplifting!
Rogue Valley strong!“
By Jim Teece
Southern Oregon Business Journal
Publisher
jim@SouthernOregonBusiness.com
As a customer of InfoStructure we were impressed with their ability to keep us live for our internet, phone and access to the cloud. Their advanced planning for a disruption at their offices proved to be a reassurance we will not forget. Thank goodness for redundancy.
Bill Thorndike
Medford Fabrication