Eyes on the storm

Beverly Companies has been using a weather system for the last eight or nine years and general manager Tom Marsan says it provides short-term forecasts and weather updates as they get close to possible storms.

“They put weather warnings out for us and kind of continue to give us updates through a storm,” he says. “Then after the storm they do provide us weather reports for that event.”

Beverly Companies is a commercial outdoor property maintenance company based in Markham, Illinois, that services healthcare buildings, office buildings and industrial properties.

Prior to using a weather system, Marsan monitored storms by watching the news, something he still does in conjunction with using a weather service.

“If there is any surprise storm or some weather not expected, they will call, email, text perhaps,” Marsan says. “They kind of reach out in multiple ways when something does happen.”

Jay Presutti, CEO of East Coast Industrial Services, says his use of weather systems has been the opposite. He used a weather system in the past and now monitors storms on his own.

“We’ve used a couple of different weather systems,” he says. “The problem I found with the systems is some property management companies will only accept certified snow totals.”

If a company doesn’t accept the levels offered by the service Presutti is using, there’s conflict.

Additionally, Presutti says he has noticed differences in the amounts of snowfall reported by different weather systems.

“When you’re getting paid by the inch after a certain amount of a threshold, it’s a huge problem for one weather service to say you had 70 inches of snow, and then another provider says you had 60 inches of snow. That could literally be the difference between thousands of dollars,” he says.

Another factor that influenced his decision to self-monitor storms was the cost of the service itself. It averaged almost $2,000 for the service for a season, depending on how many area or zip codes he was using. So he switched to self-monitoring about seven years ago.

“I found that I’m pretty accurate with monitoring it on Weather Underground and then comparing Weather Underground to AccuWeather and doing my own comparison through two or three different free services and laying out the totals and see which one’s the closest,” Presutti says.

He uses the free services in conjunction with watching the local news, and also uses a free local service run by two hobbyist meteorologists.