Sad update from the BX studio and offices
(von Dirk auf fb)
Here it is. All the details. Yes it's bad. But NO, it's not a hopeless situation. Thank you for all your positive and supporting messages so far.
We walked through knee-deep water today to get to our offices and the studio, even before the water went away again.
Our region in Germany has been hit with more rain in the last few days than ever(!). Maybe that climate change thingy is real...
More than 50 people died today in our region so far, and I am sure that number is going to grow. So sad.
Compared to that, the loss of some equipment or some damage to a building is obviously not as dramatic. But my company in Germany has more than 50 employees at this point, and all of them feed their families from the work we (usually) do in that office and studio building. So losing most of our rooms and effectively not having a working pro studio in Germany right now is no joke at all for us BX-ers. It sucks big time tbh.
There are a couple of positive things worth noting though: we had outgrown that building in the last 2 years, so we have considered buying a bigger space before. Maybe this is the time now? We had considered re-working our studio. Maybe this is the time now? We have been working in home-office mode for 15 months now, so most of our office tools and computers actually weren't in the BX building when it was flooded. Thank god for that!
The painful news: the water got into the building for 15 hours and marks on the wall and on racks show a height of more than 2 feet (more than 60cm) peak. Anything that was standing on the floor got destroyed. The studio room sits almost a foot higher, so the damage was at least a bit less in that room. But it wasn't pretty to open the doors...
Our PMC MB-2 XBD are destroyed, our Burmester power-amp is gone, our NEVE console has water damage on the bottom connectors (channels stayed dry!). All the rack gear at the bottom of the many racks we have was destroyed. Luckily ALL of the destroyed stuff is equipement we have already modeled. AMEK 9098 comp and other rare units. Future models were sitting on top of racks, on tables etc., so we can continue working on all our roadmap products!
We saved a TON of 19" equipment and brought it upstairs, where we have 1,000 sq.ft. of usable space left (of 5,000 sq.ft. original space). Safe.
If we decide to renovate the ground level it's going to take months. All doors and frames are unusable. All dry-walls have to be redone. All flooring. That's after we have to rip out everything and dry everything. In the middle of a area-wide catastrophe which will have hundreds of thousands of people trying to find builders, materials and equipment. Not fun at all.
To my team: we WILL get through this! You're all working from home now anyway, and Winfried and I will get to work on a solution for this mess right away. In fact, we have already started today!
A small group of BX guys have already helped today, which was a tough day for you all. Thanks! The smell of oil and feces is in the air, as the water brought all the goodies to BX. Thank you for your help Patricia, Mark, Flo, Brat, Julian. And tomorrow we'll have a few more guys there to help.
To the rest of our team: please stay home and keep on working away on your various projects! You help the company best by continuing to rock your projects, while we will start to hire professional help for the building tomorrow.
Thank you to my family for understanding that I won't have a lot of time to play in the next couple of days...
To our partner companies and business contacts: please bare with us while we organize ourselves in the next few days.
Last not least, thank you to all our customers and friends and fans at Brainworx and Plugin Alliance. Our servers are not on site, so our web sites will serve you as always, our support team is working from home anyway (and not only in Germany anyway). So your sessions will be safe and the show will go on. We can use your support now more than ever, so we'll do whatever we can to continue making the world sound a little better every day.
As a team and company, we lost a lot today. But I guarantee we'll get out of this in better shape than ever before. There is big chances in new beginnings, always!