This week, Brian Gomski (Midwest Machinery) | Director of Marketing, Dustin Schafer | (Henderson Engineers Inc.) Director of Engineering and Mitch Case | (Midwest Machinery) Sales Engineer discuss reopening businesses after the COVID-19 quarantine in the United States.

Subscribe to Engineering Tomorrow on your favorite Podcast Platform

Full Show Transcript

00:01 Brian: Welcome to Engineering Tomorrow. You are on a very special episode because we are reopening America. That is right. We have some very smart guys on the episode today talking about how building owners can start to bring people back into their occupied spaces in the era of COVID-19. Dustin Schafer from Henderson Engineers and Mitch Case from Midwest Missionary Kansas City will be joining us today going over some scientific and engineering-related tips, strategies and suggestions for you and your building. So sit back, relax, unless you’re driving, then pay attention, put your hands at 10 and 2, and get ready for another episode of Engineering Tomorrow. Here we go. Drum roll, please.

00:49 AVR: Broadcasting around the world. This is Engineering Tomorrow, the podcast committed to bringing you the best in commercial construction, design and engineering from the brightest minds in the industry. This is the stuff they don’t teach you in school. So sit back, relax, and open your mind. You’re about to get the insider knowledge to improve your next construction project or advance your career. This is Engineering Tomorrow.

01:21 Mitch Case: Dustin, so great to catch up, and I’m looking forward to going over a handful of these things that we’re gonna talk about today. Our topic today is really gonna be talking about re-entry into the places of work, and the places that we like to go and hang out and have some fun. So I’ve been really interested in some of the articles that you’ve been writing through Henderson. So, to start off, I’d like to go ahead and just introduce yourself, where you’ve started from, where you’re at today, and then we can dig into some Henderson stuff as well.

01:49 Dustin Schafer: Sure. Thanks for having me on here. I appreciate the chance to talk about this. It’s nice to have people care about engineering.

01:55 MC: Absolutely.

01:56 Brian: We always do. Maybe not as much as other times, but yeah.

02:01 DS: Yeah. My intro, I’m Dustin Schafer, Director of Engineering at Henderson Engineers. What we do at Henderson… The easiest way to talk about is what we don’t design. Typically, we’d stay out of heavy industrial work, and we do everything else. So, from offices to schools to… And it’s all stadiums, distribution centers, hospitals, kind of the whole gamut of project types. My history, I have an Architectural Engineering degree. I’m a mechanical engineer. I worked in the biopharmaceutical industry for a while. And in the last, gosh, it’s 12 years now, I’ve been at Henderson.

02:48 MC: Right on, right on. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the different… You kinda hit on some of those areas, but do you have a specific group that you’re working with at Henderson, or do you cover all those different markets?

03:01 DS: My job as the Director of Engineering is to manage the quality of the work we do, work on some key project pursuits and really big projects, and then, in general, pay attention to the way we work, not the specific projects we work on. I have a team of 45-ish, 50 people that’s embedded in all the other teams, and I work with those guys are technical leaders that focus on the quality of the work we’re doing and the way we work. In particular, the last project I actually worked on was the Rams Stadium, the Rams Charger Stadium in LA.

03:37 MC: Awesome.

03:38 DS: Yeah, that’s been a while. That one’s almost open, and it’s been five years in the making.

03:43 Brian: As someone who lives in St. Louis, I take offense to that.

03:47 DS: I got a lot of grief from that. I have friends that are from St. Louis, and they were not happy about it.

03:52 Brian: Hopefully, you designed it faulty inside.

03:55 DS: I did not.

03:57 MC: I do believe there was an article on the fact that a crane collapsed and bumped into the Marley Cooling Towers not too long ago.

04:04 Brian: Oh, jeez.

04:04 MC: Fortunately, nobody was hurt. I understand nobody was hurt, but there you go, Brian. There is some of that mojo that you guys…

04:10 Brian: That was, yeah, karma right there.

04:15 MC: So, Dustin, I just really wanted to touch base that you just have a wide view of a lot of the different spaces that are being designed through Henderson. So your background really helps cover a lot of the different areas that we’re gonna be digging into today, so I just wanted to cover that as we continue on. First, I would just like to talk about some of the things that we… We are obviously living in a pandemic right now, and a lot of states are starting to re-open. There’s a lot of hesitation on, “What are the best practices to re-enter? Do we hold off? Is there gonna be a second wave?” If you look in the internet, you’ll be able to find anything you want on what this is gonna look like. So I’d love to just get your perspective from all the different areas that your expertise and what you’ve learned on what we know about the virus, and maybe some things that we don’t know, and then maybe we can dig into what we do know from what this virus does from surface levels, droplets, and airborne debris.

05:12 DS: Yeah. So my last 12 weeks here have been all COVID all the time, so if there’s a paper on the Internet, there’s a good chance I’ve read it. It’s absolutely front of mind with our clients right now. The interesting thing about a situation like this is we don’t know everything. We don’t even really know what we don’t know, and that’s hard. It’s hard for people. When it comes to life safety issue and engineering, people want certainty, and instead, we’re having a conversation about risk around life safety and acceptable levels of risk, and it’s an awkward conversation. People wanna know what to do, and I will tell you, I don’t know exactly what to do and neither does anyone else, but we know what we think will work. So, the best way I’ve found to frame the conversation is to say that really the virus has three transmission modes. There’s droplet transmission, big droplets coming from a person actively shedding the virus. And those are the most common stories you’re reading, like the choir practice where everybody got it, the person sneezing on the subway. That’s the obvious transmission of like, “Yeah, I saw that happen and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna get it.” That’s the biggest risk.

06:31 MC: “That happened in my face.” Yes, okay.

06:34 DS: Yeah, yeah. So, big droplet transmission is one. Small droplet transmission is when a big droplet dries out in drier air and aerosolizes and becomes airborne. That’s the one where the science is still out on how much of a risk that is. So if it was the measles, we know exactly how much of a risk that is. For something like this, we don’t know yet. Is it on the measles end of the spectrum or is it on the common cold end of the spectrum? That remains to be seen. There’s a real equation you can use once you get the empirical data about how transmissible it is via aerosols, but we don’t know that yet.

07:12 MC: Wow.

07:13 DS: So there’s big droplets, small droplets, and then there’s surface transmission, which is really a large droplet depositing on a surface and then you come by and touch that and touch your face. That’s the obvious things you can do, like washing your hands often, touching things as little as possible, installing touchless fixtures. There’s good, obvious stuff you can do to break that transmission vector. The other two are a little bit trickier.

07:42 MC: Yeah. And speaking from somebody that had a baby about five weeks ago, we are just completely in the unknown on what’s the right thing to do from an infant standpoint. And like you said, so many unknowns of what happens long-term. And it does give me comfort that people are working hard to figure out this… It’s surprising me that there’s an equation for this. That’s where, I guess, engineering is really, really cool, was that everything can come back to math and numbers, but yeah, I just appreciate you guys working on that. And I wanted to toss in a thing here that… Dustin, you’ve written an article that really helps cover a lot of these things, so we’ll make sure that anybody that’s listening here, they can get access to that and dig a little bit deeper into that.

08:28 MC: The next thing I really wanna talk about is the biggest question I think everybody’s got is, “How do we re-enter into all the spaces that we work in, all the spaces that we love to go eat at and play?” And I know we wanna talk a little bit about… That can be different from a wide perspective of different buildings from small, medium and large spaces to… I know we were talking previously, there’s even a situation of mass gatherings to enter a sports stadium and go through security. So, I’d love for you to talk about maybe what that re-entry looks like from maybe a few different spaces and sizes, and help us to better understand maybe what’s the best move forward.

09:09 DS: Yeah. This is a tough one because of the scale of it. It’s hard to give a concrete direction that people will remember and follow that applies to everything, ’cause every building is a little bit different. For my family and when people ask me what do I think, I always go back to, it’s… What you’re trying to do is minimize the time you’re exposed to a lot of the virus, so really the way you would catch it is exposure times time. If somebody sneezes right in your face, all it takes is one second. If somebody sneezes 10 feet away from you and you’re in the spot for 15 minutes, that’s worse than being in the spot for one minute.

09:53 MC: Yeah, yeah.

09:54 DS: So, what we try to do is look at, typically, how long are people in the space and how still is the air versus how mixed is the air, how much outside air are you bringing in? There’s all these things that weigh into it. In general, the closer you can get to walking by somebody outside, the better you are. ‘Cause you want short exposure time and a lot of air moving through that’s fresh air. So what that means in real terms is… Retail has a pretty transient population, you might not need to be as concerned about airborne infection in retail. What you wanna do is more of the social distancing and mask wearing, those kind of things, because the population’s pretty transient and they’re not in that air for long, you’re trying to eliminate that single-second exposure. But an office building, or a movie theater, or an arena where you’re sitting next to somebody for an extended period of time, then you might wanna focus more on the air distribution and the quality of the air because the virus has a chance to, over time, infect somebody.

11:01 MC: Interesting, yeah. I guess I haven’t thought about… I guess from a retail perspective, as people are going in and shopping in these places, and this is also grocery stores, I know that’s been a huge change for us personally, people grabbing a box of noodles or something along those lines and then putting it back. What does that look like from the surface side of things? Is that something that can sit on that surface for longer? Should we continue to buy groceries online and pick them up? What are your thoughts on that?

11:35 DS: Yeah, this is where you pretty quickly get into my opinion because there’s science that’s all over the place on that. The surface transmission vector, I’ve seen things that say, “Totally not an issue” and things that say, “It could live on it for three days.”

11:51 MC: Gotcha, gotcha.

11:52 Brian: There’s a lot of mom-and-pop restaurants everywhere. Are there some common sense tips or suggestions or things that they can do on the HVAC side as well as within the space? Knowing full well, we don’t know everything, but are there some simple tips that we can suggest for those small businesses that maybe don’t have a massive amount of capital to invest but might be able to do a couple things?

12:24 DS: Yeah. If we’re honest, that’s most businesses, right?

12:29 Brian: Yeah.

12:30 MC: Right, absolutely.

12:31 DS: There are some huge chains that maybe do have capital to spend on big projects, but even they are kinda strapped for cash right now. So, most people fall into that category. And that’s the conversation we’ve been having is, “Well, what’s the bare minimum, practical, highest-value solution? And let’s all do that, and then we layer on specific things after that.” It’s not flashy, but yesterday, even in Henderson, I sent an email to everybody that said, “Just by default, we’re going to MERV 13 filters in our equipment.” And that doesn’t mean that it’s a mandate that every client that ever uses Henderson has to have a MERV 13. What we’re saying is, “If somebody doesn’t ask us not to do that, we’re going to do that.” The reason being, it doesn’t add a huge amount of pressure drop, it doesn’t add a lot of cost, and it will probably capture somewhere between 40% and 70% of virus-sized particles, which is way better than doing nothing.

13:32 Brian: Sure.

13:33 MC: Absolutely.

13:33 DS: That’s kind of the front-line, bare minimum strategy.

13:37 Brian: What do you think about the needlepoint bipolar ionizers and the UV systems?

13:44 DS: Both have a similar result with really different technologies, so both of those are intended to disrupt the virus at a cellular level and keep it from replicating. My personal opinion as an engineer and as a consultant to our clients is… I like to tell them, “Here’s what the science says in terms of effectiveness,” ’cause my opinion shouldn’t matter. What should matter is what we have science to prove. Right now, there’s a lot more science around the effectiveness of UVC lights than there is around bipolar ionization. I don’t want people to take that to the extreme and say, “Dustin said bipolar ionization doesn’t work.” What I said is, “There’s not as much science,” so I’m interested to see that. Those manufacturers are doing work right now to test it specifically on this virus, but that remains to be seen. I think it’s one to watch.

14:41 Brian: Okay, cool.

14:43 MC: Thanks, Dustin. Go ahead, Brian.

14:45 Brian: Oh, what about… Do you see a shift or anyone asking about switching to copper handles and stuff like that? It’s probably pretty expensive, maybe.

14:56 DS: I have seen some people talking about that. I’ve seen a lot more interest in just removing touch points all together. So, using line of sight to obscure a restroom as opposed to a door, if you’ve got space, that makes sense. An airport doesn’t have a door anyway because people are going out. I’ve seen more interest around that, and then touchless plumbing fixtures. And if somebody could figure out how to remove the touchpoint from the stall door in a restroom, that would be pretty widely accepted.

15:29 Brian: Oh my, yes. That is something we should have done 20 years ago already, anyway.

15:35 MC: I thought everybody just kicked that with their foot. That’s awesome. Let’s talk about maybe some of the problems that people are coming into that are maybe struggling the most with this. And we talked about capital before and maybe that is a real area of struggle for most of these small to medium-sized businesses. But maybe what are some other areas that people are seeing that are problems and struggling with?

16:00 DS: Obviously, cash flow is one of them. People understand they need to do something. It’s difficult to understand how much you spend versus how much you are willing to tolerate some risk, which again is a hard conversation. But if you literally have no money to spend on it, that does change the math. Another thing that was interesting to me that we see people struggling with across lots of sectors, is anything with controlled access to a space creates a line, and so that line is a bad spot in terms of transmission of disease. So that could be queuing up outside a courthouse waiting for your turn to see the judge. That could be a ball game. It could be a warehouse. Warehouses have controlled entry and exits. Everybody queues up before they go in there. That’s becoming a really difficult problem to solve because spreading people out is counter to controlled access, but it’s what brings people together. And that’s been a really interesting conversation. Technology is usually the answer. So you have either screens that show people a number and they wait far away and they come up when their number comes up. They have apps that on your phone show you lines at restrooms or other things. Technology is usually the answer, but that is also usually not the cheapest answer.

17:24 MC: Yeah. I’ve really been impressed with a lot of the different businesses around town here in Kansas City with what they’ve done to minimize those lines. And we know a lot of the grocery stores are limiting the number of people. We live near a Hy-Vee, and I was really surprised that they had repainted their parking lot to really show basically the idea of grab a ticket, park in that ticket spot, and we’ll bring the groceries to you. So it’s really amazing what people are doing trying to overcome this. I did get from what you just said that I probably shouldn’t wait in line for my burrito at Chipotle anymore.

18:00 DS: Yeah. Again, how much risk are you willing to…

18:02 MC: Risk and reward.

18:03 Brian: Hold on, I’m willing to risk it. Yeah, we gotta live life. Come on.

18:08 DS: One thing that is interesting that came up, I mentioned that courthouse example, there are a lot of public spaces that create lines and create bad situations to be in from a vector perspective, a transmission vector perspective. Saying technology is the answer and just use your phone to not wait in line is not a very equitable solution. There are a lot of people that don’t carry a phone with them all the time, and what it does is start to exacerbate that difference again between classes. And there’s no reason that because you can’t afford a phone, you should be more at risk than somebody who has one.

18:47 MC: You have to go to and risk.

18:48 DS: We have to come up with solutions that work across the board, and not just rely on the fact that people carry technology with them.

18:54 MC: Interesting. That’s a very valid point. Very valid. Wow, I haven’t had that perspective. That makes a lot of sense. So kind of the flip side of the question we just asked from what are some of the problems, what are some of the things we know are working, and it sounds like we’ve talked a little bit about those, but maybe there’s a few others that we haven’t touched on.

19:12 DS: Yeah. So, the way I would look at it is, solutions that solved multiple problems are turning out to be pretty effective. And so where I’m headed with that is, retail already wanted to do online integration with their physical stores. And the ones that were farther ahead in that have done better in this situation because they could pivot and make their stores a pick-up point, not an in-person experience. And they’ll be able to pivot back if people care more about that later. So doubling up on solutions is a pretty good thing, and that started to affect the way I think about design. How could you design around the flexibility to accommodate social distancing but also not? And an example is a restaurant. You’d have a central kitchen with two entrances, you have a front-of-house entrance with a dining room, and then you could pivot to a back-of-house, online pick-up, and scale up if you needed to. That’s a good design for a restaurant. The ones that have that have done better.

20:15 MC: Yeah, interesting.

20:17 DS: So, things like that are really seeing positive traction. Another thing is, like I said, getting rid of lines. Nobody loves airport security lines, so if you can come up with technologies that eliminate lines, there also helping to reduce the risk, but that is gonna stick and people are gonna keep doing that because that was a good solution.

20:30 Brian: Yeah, we were promised that Total Recall wall, like 20 years ago, where you walk through and you see the skeleton. Come on, Dustin. I thought we were working on that.

20:49 DS: Total Recall and Minority Report are decades in the future kind of movies.

20:51 MC: Yeah, they solved it years ago.

20:54 DS: Yeah, yeah. The other thing that I think is a pretty proven thing, I talked about before, are UV lights. I think we’re gonna see a big uptake on UV technology to sterilize things like shopping carts.

21:10 Brian: How long does that light need to be exposed on a surface for it to, I guess, kill the bacteria and virus?

21:20 DS: I’ll give you… The engineering answer is, it depends on…

21:25 Brian: Very politically correct answer, okay.

21:26 DS: Yeah, on how far away you are from the light, and then how the intensity of the source. If you have a really intense source really close to the virus, it’s seconds, less than seconds.

21:38 Brian: Okay.

21:39 DS: The farther away you are, then the longer the exposure time has to be.

21:42 Brian: Got it.

21:44 DS: The other benefit… I’m not trying to sell UV lights, but another reason I’m seeing uptake on those is that they… If you have them within line of sight of a cooling coil, it does reduce mildew and mold and other things that… You don’t have to clean the coils as often, which is a side benefit and people like that. They install it for infection control but they get the benefit of a cleaner coil. That’s an easier spend to justify.

22:09 Brian: Relatively, it’s not a huge expenditure, is it?

22:13 DS: It’s not. The equipment is relatively inexpensive. To me, as a person, I feel like spending a couple thousand dollars on lights is a lot, but for a business that’s not, right?

22:26 Brian: Yeah.

22:26 MC: Right, right.

22:27 DS: The installs can get to be a little expensive, depending on the amount of effort that goes into it. But I think as an adder to that unit at a factory or something, that could be a pretty reasonable cost. They make handheld devices that are in the hundreds, tens to hundreds of dollars to do services if you wanted that.

22:49 MC: Yeah, that sounds like a very easy implementation for maybe some of these small businesses with capital. We’ve been talking a lot about, capital budgets might be looking a lot different than they were pre-pandemic. So, what are some actionable items that we can take to help protect ourselves and potential clients while also operating off of a manageable budget? We’ll talk a little bit more and maybe about some of the stuff that Henderson is looking at from a future design perspective. But before we do that, I’d love to just touch, and I know this is gonna be your opinion type of answer. What are some things that we can do as individuals as we are going into our workspaces, as we are going into restaurants and grocery stores? What can we do to help protect ourselves and others that are around us?

23:36 DS: So if you think about it from a scientific perspective, if most of the risk is around this large droplet transmission, either from a symptomatic or an asymptomatic person, the best thing you can do is stop shedding large droplets inside buildings. That’s a scientific way of saying, “Wear a mask.” I know that not everybody loves those. We’re not saying, “Wear masks because they’re comfortable.” What we’re saying is, “Wear masks because if everybody does that, it lowers the collective risk, and it helps us open our economy faster.” It is a low-cost way to do that and you’re not shifting that responsibility to the building owner and saying, “I need you to do a more expensive technology to solve this problem.” What you’re saying is, “I’m willing to do my $2 part to keep from shedding this virus in your building.” It’s hard to tell if you’re the one shedding the virus or not. I would say wear a mask, and it doesn’t cost you much and it is pretty effective.

24:41 MC: There’s some pretty awesome masks out there that I’ve been seeing recently too, so you can really get creative and show your creative side with these masks.

24:49 DS: I’ve seen ones that have beards on them, which is pretty cool. So, I can still keep my beard.

24:56 MC: Yeah. John Flan over at Henderson had a… I understand he shaved his beard and we sent over a mask that tried to show a beard on it, but I don’t think it worked out as great as it looked when we sent it over to him.

25:09 DS: It was out of scale, I saw that.

25:11 MC: It was extremely, extremely out of scale. The nose was the size of his face. I had a lot of fun with that one. What are some things that we can do from company leaders as employers, employees start coming back that we can help encourage them and make them feel safe as well?

25:32 DS: Yeah, that’s the question. So, I think what matters as much as the science is the perception that people need to feel safe before they’ll routinely go back into buildings. And I think the quicker we can move beyond this as a political issue and just get to the psychological issue that people deserve to feel safe in their buildings, the better. What we’re trying to do, what I would encourage other people to do, is be flexible and recognize that people have friends and relatives that have died from this. And other people haven’t heard of a single person that’s got it, so there’s the whole spectrum of reactions. What you can do is be flexible as a building owner, and design buildings that will accommodate the people that wanna come back, try to keep them as safe as possible, but rely on technology and remote working, and online pick-ups, and all these other things to accommodate the people that aren’t there yet, that don’t feel safe. The great by-product of that is, if people stay home, that makes it way easier to social distance for the people that did come back. So you’re prioritizing those people that need to be there over the ones that can function without being there, and it’s a phased-in approach.

26:48 MC: Yeah, and we’ve seen a lot, at least from different sources of different business owners and building operators, basically setting the things that, “Hey, these are the steps that we have done to help protect you guys as you come in.” And it sounds like that falls right in line with what Henderson is doing as well, but also giving the flexibility of… Like you said from the very beginning, this is all based on your tolerance and risk, and if we can minimize or help you manage your risk factors by doing these certain steps, then this is what we’ve done. Dustin, that’s… Go ahead.

27:21 DS: One way I’d wanna categorize that, just to be really clear, is if it’s possible, spend your money to make it possible for people to work remotely or not use your building. The other extreme of that is something like a prison. A prison, the person’s gonna be there. It’s the nature of the building that they’re there all the time. So maybe you could spend more on the airborne infection control than on the social distancing. It depends on your population, so it’s not a one-size-fits-all answer.

27:50 MC: Yeah, that’s another interesting… Are you guys getting involved with some of those types of facilities and helping understand what’s the best course of action for them?

28:00 DS: Yeah, for sure. I’ve had this same conversation probably close to 50 times with clients across the whole spectrum, and that’s been one of them.

28:10 MC: Yeah, so let’s dig into… I’m sure those conversations with those clients are all based around, what is Henderson doing for future designs to learn from this, to prevent another pandemic in the future? What steps is Henderson doing today to better ensure their clients are getting a… I don’t wanna say pandemic-proof solution here, but just maybe a preventative option that helps them understand, “These are the things that we have learned from this, and this is what we’re implementing on future designs.”

28:42 DS: Yeah, so I mentioned that they’re going to MERV 13 filters as a default. That’s one thing. What we’ve done internally is just assemble all the research and the pricing and the application. We have what’s called application guidelines, which are documents we write for internal use, and we have an infection control application guideline that has all of this stuff pulled into one spot ’cause I think our role is to consult. So, the solution’s different depending on the question. It’s my job, my team’s job, to get the information there to make it possible to answer those questions. To me, though, the more interesting thing from a design perspective is to say, “What else could happen?”

29:27 MC: That’s a loaded question.

29:29 DS: We’ve spent some time thinking about that because this is front of mind with people right now, but it’s not the only thing that could happen.

29:39 Brian: Like something with murder hornets? Is that on…

29:45 DS: That’s not gonna never happen, that’s crazy.

29:47 MC: We skipped over that. Next week, next week.

29:50 DS: I read a thing that said, “Notes to 2020” and it was like, “I feel like murder hornets are a little too on the nose, we need to take that out of the script.” But yeah, so we had this conversation about two months ago right at the beginning of this and said, “What else could happen? Let’s talk about things that our clients could see, talk about solutions, and then let’s propose solutions that address multiple situations.” And one of the engineers on my team said, “The thing I’m more worried about than the pandemic is social unrest and the impact that that could have on our client.” And it turns out that was a pretty good suggestion, that’s the kind of thing we need to help people design around. We’ve also talked about, “What if there’s a cyber attack that shuts down the power grid?” Then energy resilience, power resilience becomes a real thing.

30:43 DS: Climate change is a long-term emergency, we have goals around that. How do we start to talk about all these concerns and then back in to solutions that address those and say, “Hey, you know what? It turns out solar panels work great. PV panels work great for climate change. They also provide energy resilience if you design your facility right. That’s one solution to solve two problems.” So what we’re trying to do is look at these holistically and not just react to this particular crisis with solutions that address just this crisis. We’re trying to say, “If you’re a proactive building owner, what could you do to address lots of concerns so that you’re ready in the event of who knows what comes next.”

31:24 MC: Are you seeing some of those clients more open to these, what I would say, more upfront capital costs to help solve these long-term issues or potential concerns? Or do you see them more focusing on the upfront cost a lot of times?

31:41 DS: It depends. So if your business relies on this and you have cash flow, you’re pretty willing to spend money on it. We definitely have clients whose business relies on this, and they haven’t been open for three months, so their cash flow situation is not good. So those are tough conversations because they know they need to do something, and they want to do something, and they’re focused on safety, but the cash flow is not there to support it. It depends. Some clients are pretty excited and interested on what they can do and ready to move, and some don’t have that option.

32:17 MC: Awesome. Well, Dustin, that really brings us to the end of this episode. But before we close off, I just wanted to see if you had any last messages, anything you wanted to add right there at the end to let our viewers hear.

32:33 DS: Yeah. What I would say is, let’s all take a breath and be pragmatic about what solutions work and not worry about this being a political issue, but worry about it being the scientific issue. And there’s some things that we could do. Let’s all just get to work and calm down and get American back open again. But we can move past this, and I think that it’s a good chance for us to come together as a community. I just hope we move more in that direction and start talking about the real practical things we can do in the short term.

33:08 Brian: There we have it, folks. I don’t know about you guys, but I thoroughly loved having that discussion. Hoping you guys took some great value from that or some tips and tricks to pass on to building owners and operators letting people back into their buildings. For engineering questions or to learn more about Henderson engineers, please visit hendersonengineers.com. And for more great videos, audio resources and downloads related to commercial HVAC, please visit engineeringtomorrow.blog. Until next time, friends, keep engineering for tomorrow today.

33:46 MC: Thanks for joining us on Engineering Tomorrow. If you liked the show, please take a moment to subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. For even more great engineering or construction knowledge, visit engineeringtomorrow.blog.