ADA Foundation and IDA grants help Parkersburg dentist begin to rebuild

“The future? Pretty good, I think,” Dr. Mason said. “We’re going to start rebuilding. It shouldn’t take us long to get the community back on its feet. You can get something better out of this huge tragedy. We were talking about building a bigger office and we’re shoved right into it.” For this wellspring of optimism Dr. Mason credits organized dentistry, her dental supplier, the community and her patients “who are so worried we are going to leave because we lost our house and office.”

Dr. Mason is the only dentist in “small town” Parkersburg where she arrived fresh from dental school with community and professional loan and grant incentives, and she’s not about to leave, she assures anyone who asks. “They’re all worried that I’m leaving town. No, I’m not leaving.” Her patients “have no other place to go. They’re behind us 100 percent.” She directs emergencies to nearby towns while striving to maintain practice in a mobile clinic on loan for the summer from the Mercer County, Ill., health department.

“Pretty much everything was destroyed. We recovered our air compressor and pump. Patterson (Dental Supply, Inc.) took them out. All our records were saved so we can start rescheduling people when we get the motor home. We had a little trouble with X-rays, but I think Patterson can tweak that.” The practice, two small operatories, has as many or more patients as the town has people, several thousand in both cases, some of them coming “from all the way up to Mason City.” Her patients range in age from six months to 102, the latter patient “a spunky lady,” said Dr. Mason.

Patterson’s Troy Larkin picks up the story. “We set her up here three years ago. The city of Parkersburg really wrapped their arms around Lori and Paul (husband and office manager) to get them to come to the community in the first place with a lot of incentives. They’d only been in their (new) house a few weeks. They’d just built it.”

The office building, on the other hand, remained intact though shaken for its dance with destruction. The tornado lifted the brick facility, a former bank building, off its foundation and removed the roof for good measure, winds twisting the structure in an ugly embrace, planting instruments in walls and sucking the contents of drawers before returning it to earth, an X-ray head bent as if in prayer. They found the computer hard drive for Dr. Mason’s digital and paperless practice in the debris. “We took the server to the University of Iowa IT (information technology) department and their field engineers were able to capture the data,” Mr. Larkin told the ADA News. “Today we talked to the mayor and others in the community. We’re going to find her a location to practice.”

They move quickly in wind-ravaged Parkersburg. Dr. Mason said a new house was already going up on the site of the destroyed home they occupied but eight weeks. “The city of Parkersburg proposed we set up in a professional office building they’re going to set up, and Troy is going to be designing the new office.” Mr. Larkin arranged with the Mercer County, Ill., health department for loan of the mobile clinic to get Parkersburg’s dental practice through the summer and into a new location, this year, perhaps.

That’s Dr. Mason’s ambition and Parkersburg’s hope.

ADA.org offers a five-step guide to survival and recovery of a dental business. Born of hurricane experience and contributions of the Florida Dental Association and Florida Dental Health Foundation and funded in part by the ADA Foundation, the disaster planning and recovery package offers guides and resources, worksheets and applications.

“Proactive planning can mitigate loss, save lives and assure your practice continues to function when it may be needed most,” says the guide for dental professionals. “The time to plan for a crisis is now.”