When an eight-inch water main broke and flooded basements in Saint Paul’s East Side last month, Restoration Professionals showed up quickly with portable pumps.

“We always answer the phone,” said Ed Strom, president of the company that built its headquarters in the Saint Paul Port Authority’s Great Northern Business Center in 2006.

“Other contractors stop work at 5 or 6 o’clock, but we have an employee answering the phone 24/7, 365 days a year,” Strom said. “Our customers know that they’re not going to talk to an answering service.”

This devotion to their customers has not gone unnoticed. Recently, the company received the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce Deubener Award for Emerging Business. That award was added to industry accolades the company has received over the past few years, including two received at the Multi Housing Achievement in Design, Advertising and Community Support (MADACS) Awards Ceremony.

Restoration Professionals (www.restpro.com) could be called the emergency ambulance version of contractors. Its 60 employees tackle everything from major fire and flood damage to duct cleaning and pest control and its 36,000-square-foot facility has areas where damaged documents or expensive art can be painstakingly freeze-dried or where all the contents of a house or business can be stored securely during long periods of reconstruction.

“We’ve done work for some of the largest corporations in the Twin Cities and we’ve done one room in a corner of a homeowner’s basement – and everything in between,” Strom said. “A lot of our employees feel like they’re the guys in the white hats riding in to save the day.”

Leah Mesic, the company’s quality systems manager, grins when she describes the prevailing company attitude. “I think everyone here is a kind of adrenaline junkie,” she said.

Technically, Restoration Professionals has been in existence since 2003 when Strom and founding CEO Tim Labey decided to take a family-owned carpet-cleaning business in a new direction.

“It wasn’t like we started from nothing because the other business had been around since 1998 and we had some good employees – 15, including Tim and I – and some good customers who came with us,” Strom said. “It was slow for only a few months and it’s been a race ever since.”

By 2005, Strom and Labey, who grew up near each other in the same Saint Paul neighborhood, were looking for a larger facility to replace rented space in Roseville. And they liked the idea of relocating in their hometown.

“After looking at a variety of existing buildings, we realized that we were never going to get exactly what we really wanted and that we would spend a lot of money anyway,” Strom recalled. “That’s when the opportunity with the Port Authority to build from scratch presented itself and it took just a year to close on the property and build.”

From the start, Strom says the company sought to be the single-source solution for emergencies, with a highly trained staff. A wall in the main office is covered with training certificates earned by company employees. “We are the only company in the Midwest with three master restorers on its staff,” Strom said with evident pride.

When giving a tour of the company’s neat-as-a-pin operations and storage areas, Strom relishes the chance to show off high-tech imaging equipment used to detect hidden water damage or huge areas where equipment is readied for quick deployment. Parts of the building look like a well-maintained fire department, with vehicles lined up at the ready behind big overhead doors.

A major point of satisfaction, Strom said, comes from providing services to people who have been clobbered by an unexpected emergency.

“We put a lot of emphasis on customer service and relationships,” he said. “We deal every day with people who have experienced trauma and we have to be fast, efficient and accurate about things like cost and expectations.

“We have to deal with emotions and heartaches and sometimes it’s tough,” Strom added. “But it’s great to help people and it’s exciting because the work is fast-paced. It’s addictive and contagious.”

The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development’s (DEED) efforts since 1995 leveraged $3 billion in private investment in the state, $70 million in increased tax base, 31,000 new and retained jobs and the clean up of 3,000 acres of contaminated land, the federal government noted in honoring DEED recently.

DEED received the national honor during the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) national conference in New Orleans. The Saint Paul Port Authority nominated DEED for the national honor.

DEED launched the statewide Contamination Cleanup and Investigation Grant Program in 1995. Since that time, more than $112 million in grants have been awarded to more than 200 projects. The Port Authority received more than $17 million of that total in contamination cleanup and redevelopment grants.

The DEED programming started with state appropriations funding to get contaminated sites back into productive reuse. Prior to the establishment of this program, sites went through the Superfund process and could be tied up for years. The Contamination Cleanup and Investigation Grant program aimed to jump start development.

A statutory requirement of the grant program, which awards nearly $4 million per grant cycle, is that a quarter of the funding is designated for rural areas. Site investigation grants are awarded up to $50,000 per project. The size of cleanup grants can vary, but average $500,000 per project.

The EPA Revolving Loan Fund grants provided to DEED throughout the years is used as gap financing for projects that use the Contamination Cleanup and Investigation grant program. To date, DEED RLF funding includes $3.1 million for hazardous substances and $2 million for petroleum.