DigMyPics.com

To our customers and friends,

On Monday May 5, 2008 at approximately 2am, Arizona Time, DigMyPics suffered a devastating fire which destroyed our building and most of its contents.  The fire was large and the neighboring city of Mesa was called in to help fight it.  Three large ladder trucks were used to douse the flames.   Despite the best efforts of both city's firefighters, the building was completely destroyed. Our website, email, customer database, and telephone lines are all currently down as a result.

As you can imagine, Annette and I are heartbroken by what has happened. We always believed that our customers placed their trust in us when they sent us their photos and videos and we took that responsibility personally and extremely seriously.

Annette, the employees of DigMyPics, and I are all still in shock and disbelief and we aren't sure if we'll even try to rebuild the company.  What we are sure of is that we want to help those people that had put their trust in us to retrieve whatever is retrievable.  We're putting together a restoration team to help us restore whatever is uncovered.  The Gilbert Fire Department has been extremely helpful to us and are sensitive to what we had in the building.  They're working hard to help us find and extract our customer's photos and videos.  The scene is currently under their custody as they investigate the fire's cause but today we delivered a trailer to them and they've agreed to put any photos, film, hard drives or computers that they find in that trailer and give us access to it twice a day.  We'll take the material to another site we've temporarily leased to begin work on salvaging any images or videos that can be saved.

I don't want to give any false hope, some people may have lost everything, but we had some encouraging news today.  The fire department was able to successfully retrieve our servers and their forensic team has told us that the servers look good and that the data is likely retrievable.  We store a copy of the images that have been completed on some of those servers.  The building is completely destroyed but the roof collapse may have sheltered some areas from the worst effects.  Fire crews are removing pieces of the roof and have found some photos and reels in tact.

Scott Crossen

 

Additional information, as we get it, will be posted here.

On Monday, we contacted the major couriers and asked them to return any shipments bound for us to their sender.  If you sent us something scheduled to arrive this week, expect it to be returned to you.

All of the local Phoenix stations carried the story. Here is the story as reported by Fox News 10 and here is the story on ABC15.com

 

Thursday, May 8  2:04 am
We've received an overwhelming amount of sympathy and encouragement from friends, customers and the community.  Most of the messages we're receiving are quite incredible. Some have moved us to tears. 

We continue to be impressed by the professionalism and care shown by the Gilbert Fire Department. Wednesday  morning we were introduced to a team of people they have assembled to sort through any recovered material and collect and box up any photos and videos found.  We were encouraged by what they were finding in the morning, but what we saw then was the bulk of what was to be recovered.  By the afternoon they had completed the entire production area and had recovered only around 10 boxes full of photos and a box of 8mm reels.  We may have no way to know who the photos or videos belong to.  What we plan to do is digitize and restore everything and anything that we have and any without an owner will be made available to everyone that had materials in the building.  Those people can review the material and download what's theirs. It might take a few weeks to complete this process.  I'll continue to write here as we progress.

We've had a few people write interested in recovering their money.  We're planning on refunding everything to anyone that had anything in the building but it may take us some time to sort through who that is.  Please don't file a dispute with your credit card yet. That will complicate our task and increase our costs as the credit card company charges us a substantial fee for every dispute they receive.

We are receiving emails at sales@digmypics.com but we aren't able to respond to every message.  We will in the coming days try to work through them.

Thursday May 8 2:45pm
A lot has happened in the last 12 hours since my previous post so I wanted to take a minute to write an update.
The Gilbert Fire Dept and their support team CERT has spared nothing to recover our customer's memories.  We stored each order in a plastic, sealable tote.  The fire melted many of these totes into tiny pods, encasing their contents in the plastic.  The CERT team has been cracking open these pods and finding some stuff in pristine condition.

While Annette and I were at the site this morning, the fire chief, Wes Kemp, told us his team was attempting a rescue of some bins that we had kept up front near our servers for local customers awaiting pickup.  The roof in that area remained attached to the wall but a section of it fell down at an angle and remained perched on top of our server server racks and these bins.  A large A/C unit was also on that section of the roof.  Wes's team has been determined to save as much as possible for our customers and they had their sites set on recovering these bins.  They brought in some equipment to delicately lift the roof while firefighters crawled under debris and pulled them out.  Everything was a little wet but in very good condition.  One of these customers was Melinda, the customer who appeared in the Fox10 story.

We need to thank the fine people at American Family Insurance.  They've been facilitating the efforts of the fire department by allowing them to release customer material.  They've assembled a team of people that have come together to help us figure out what's what.

I hope people don't mind, but we continue to be touched by the outpouring of support and help.  I'm going to post some of those messages here.  Maybe they'll help other the way they're helping us.

See some of the messages from customers

Thursday May 8,  5:51pm
We just met with Fire investigators who have finished their investigation and are turning the site over to the insurance company.  They isolated a 10x10 area where the fire started.  They suspect electrical wiring. An electrical engineer from the insurance company will be working on that tomorrow.

 

Here are some photos of the fire and devastation if you're up for it.