By Jessica Garcia

Day in and day out, we run our facilities to the best of our abilities. Sporadically, something transpires that really challenges us.

Imagine this scenario: your garage loses power … on a Friday morning … during the middle of rush hour! It happened to us. We had cars that began to pile up on one another, the gates were down, and our parkers had nowhere to go. We frantically searched for the breaker box to reset the power but it could not be located. Our parkers were becoming frantic. We calmly told them to park their cars where they could, as close to the entrance as possible, and removed the gate arms. It was a parking operator’s nightmare.

We began searching with the team of building engineers for the correct breaker box and quickly ran out of location options. By coincidence, we notice the garage next door also had no power. Could it be possible that somehow shared a power source? Crazy as it sounds, our garage’s breaker box was in the connecting garage on a shared wall!

We reset the breaker and were able to get the power back up and running. We got all of our parkers notified and all the vehicles safely parked, and then got the gate arms functioning and our facility running flawlessly.

Every day is a parking adventure with many learning experiences, especially that Friday!

Jessica Garcia is an operations manager at Winpark.