Complaint Review: Rainbow International of Charlottesville

We had a serious water leak in our weekend house in January 2014 that lasted perhaps 18 hours.  The water had completely soaked a pine floor and some carpeting.  We shut off the main water valve and several of us spent the next 7-8 hours moving all furniture to safe areas; removing all standing water from the wood floor; and using water vacs to remove the water from the wall to wall carpeting.  We then left for Northern Virginia where we reside 130 miles away.

I reported the damage to my State Farm agent who recommended we use a man named Troy Boor (owner of Rainbow Int'l of Charlottesville) for further drying and remediation.   We thought "remediation" might save the 460 square feet of pine flooring. This review is to state how we were billed by Rainbow almost $4,000 for "remediation."

When we first contacted Rainbow, we were immediately emailed a contract that stated that no estimate for remediation was possible and that the costs could not be determined in advance.  This was a HUGE red flag but I unfortunately relied on the recommendation of my insurance agent and plowed ahead.  Big mistake.

I gave owner Troy Boor the info to gain access to the property and the next day he visited (I was later billed over $100 for an emergency visit !).  He called me at my home to discuss the damage and to gain access to the garage (located below the flooded rooms).  Troy also stated his son would return the next day with drying equipment. I was again told costs could not be determined in advance.   OK I said, completely ignorant of how the remediation business works and with no idea that I was about to be charged huge daily rental fees for said equipment and that indeed Mr. Boor knew exactly what those daily fees would be.

This failure on Mr Boor's part was clearly deliberate.  If I had simply been told up front the cost for set-up and daily rental I would have said (after I stopped laughing) forget it or—maybe, just maybe—do what you can for $500 if you think the effort will save the floor.  The cost to entirely replace that floor would be about $4,000 (including materials and labor).  I know this because: (1) I had the original floor installed and (2) I had a new one installed in May-June.  Apparently in Troy Boor's BIZARRO world, it is OK to spend $4,000 to save something that costs that amount to replace !!

The next day, 11 floor fans & 1 dehumidifier were brought and placed in the rooms.  I would later be invoiced labor of eight man hours at $37 an hour (a total of $300) to simply carry in, place, and plug in 12 pieces of equipment—outrageous gouging !!

When I attempted to get in touch with Troy Boor later that week to see how things were going, I was told he was on a "cruise" and his son Ethan was in charge.  Uh-oh...  A week later I received my first communication from Rainbow since prior to the equipment install.  Son Ethan had called me to report that a glass shelving unit had fallen because the wood floor had buckled so severely as to push it over.  It would have been obvious to any honest person at that point that the floor could not be saved.  (I would not see the floor myself until 3 days later.) By the way, the son simply left the broken glass on the floor, even though it would have taken only a few minutes to clean it up.  Dreadful.

Also: I later discovered I was being charged for "monitoring" (at a cost of anywhere from $37 to  $56 an hour) and yet I NEVER received a single report or photo as to the conditions. 

Because of this odd phone call, I asked the contractor who built the house to visit the location, assess the situation, and determine the source of the leak (something miserable Rainbow never did).  He called me from the location and told me there were 11 floor fans packed into the small space (two in the tiny hall closet area alone) and the floor clearly would not be salvageable.  He kindly cleaned up the glass on the floor,  and easily located the leak: a fridge water line.

I still had no idea that I was being charged a DAILY rental cost for each floor fan and the dehumidifier.  Are you ready?  The fans were being billed to me at over $200 per day and the dehumidifier at $110 for a daily total cost of $312 a day.  That does not even include the cost of bringing the stuff ($300) or the cost to remove it (also some hundreds of dollars).  Total labor for dropping the equipment off, so-called “monitoring,” and removing the equipment:  $780.  Outrageous...

As soon as Rainbow realized we had returned to the property with the insurance adjuster, and that the insurer had seen the floor was not salvageable, and had not been salvageable for a week, they scurried over and removed their equipment (after we had left of course).

They sent a bill to our insurer for just under $4,000. Weirdly, NO bill was sent to -- although WE had hired them and ALL communications had been with us.  This invoicing tactic is yet another sign of a shady operator.

STAY AWAY from these people.