By stepping up to offer disinfecting services, Timberline Landscaping has avoided needing to lay off or furlough workers in Colorado.
Photo courtesy of Timberline Landscaping

by Enrico Villamaino

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses are scrambling to adapt to a marketplace very different from the one in which they were operating just a few short weeks ago.

Timberline Landscaping of Colorado Springs, CO, is taking the initiative to maintain its revenues, keep people on the payroll and offer a service badly needed by its community. Timberline is now offering disinfecting services throughout the El Paso County region.

Joshua Pool, who has served as Timberline’s chief operating officer for three years, stated it’s a move borne of necessity. “Judd Bryarly, our CEO, was trying to come up with a way to keep on all of our workers. At the moment, the new landscape installation and maintenance branches of our company are holding pretty steady, with both our commercial and residential clients. But we’ve had to cut out the renovation part of the business right now. That hurts us.”

Timberline has 190 employees at present, but that number usually swells to 220 during the peak season (the end of April through November).

In order to prevent laying off a number of its staff, Timberline is offering public and private clients the opportunity to have their properties and facilities disinfected. Pool said, “We were thinking playgrounds, benches, tables, picnic structures, handrails, bicycle racks, trash cans – anything that could be considered a ‘high touch’ object or area.”

Timberline already had in stock all the personal protective equipment to do the work. “All we really needed to do was buy the disinfectant,” he said.

COVID-19 is classified as an enveloped virus. According to the EPA, enveloped viruses are highly susceptible to inactivation by disinfection. The structure of enveloped viruses includes a lipid envelope, which is effectively compromised by most disinfectants. Once the lipid envelope is exposed to a disinfectant, the virus’s ability to infect is neutralized.

“We’re getting disinfecting work from our existing client base,” Pool explained, adding that it is slow going. “There hasn’t been as much of a push to disinfect playgrounds as we had hoped right now, because a lot the objects that might need it are closed off.”

He hopes that as social distancing requirements become less strict, the need for more disinfecting work will rise. “We’ll be glad to help out,” he said.

For more information visit www.timberlinelandscaping.com. To learn more about the EPA’s expanded COVID-19 disinfectant list visit epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-expands-covid-19-disinfectant-list.