CORONAVIRUS

North Augusta family navigates coronavirus crisis en route to helping others

Will Cheney
wcheney@augustachronicle.com
Brian and Tennille Williams, middle, are the owners of Briten Janitorial and are seen here with their daughters who also help with the business, Emory, 16, left, and Alexis, 19, right, Photographed at their home in North Augusta, S.C., Wednesday morning May 27, 2020. [MICHAEL HOLAHAN/THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE]

NORTH AUGUSTA -- Frontline workers come in many different shapes and forms.

While doctors and nurses generally come to mind, another set of dedicated individuals is tasked with protecting those medical professionals and their work spaces.

Tennille Williams and her husband, Brian, own Briten Janitorial in North Augusta. While they’re known simply as janitors, that title may take deeper meaning from here on out. The Williams family and their 40-plus employees specialize in terminal and critical cleaning and infection prevention, fulfilling contracts across the Augusta area including Plant Vogtle, Augusta University Health and a number of nursing homes and other businesses.

Tennille and Brian have known each other since they were ages 6 and 7, respectively. They’ve operated Briten for over 20 years and the last several have been the toughest their family and business have experienced.

For Tennille, what began as severe back pain became the word no family wants to hear. After visiting 12 different doctors over nine years, a sonogram revealed a tumor.

“She had been in pain for years and it just kept getting worse. We were doing all kinds of stuff and they found out she had cancer,” Brian said. “She had gone in for back surgery because they thought it was discs and then they found out it was this particular type of cancer. That just kinda stopped everything then.”

In the process of building their dream home, the Williams family was forced to juggle keeping the business afloat while paying hefty medical bills. Brian and Tennille credit the business community in North Augusta, including chamber of commerce CEO Terra Carroll.

“When she had cancer, it was chaos. I, honestly, was not running the business well. Terra Carroll was bringing us dinner and helping run our business. Whatever we needed, she was doing,” Brian said. “She even offered to throw on jeans and tennis shoes to help with an account. This whole business community here and the friendships that we have, they just were massively supportive of her and our family.”

More members of the cavalry came from the Williams’ household. Their two oldest daughters, Alexis and Emory, are Briten employees and help their parents out at different job sites. Alexis, 19, spends her days at Vogtle and Emory, 16, helps at different medical facilities and nursing homes around Aiken County.

Tennille describes terminal cleaning as a top-to-bottom cleaning of all exposed surfaces. The importance of the process is what’s known as dwell time. Spraying a cleaning solution on a surface and immediately wiping it doesn’t give the solution time to remove the pathogens. Most dwell times take between five and 10 minutes, depending on the chemical.

She added the same rule applies to consumer hand sanitizer. What separates them from regular cleaning services is their ability to verify the results with testing equipment, giving their clients peace of mind.

Briten and others in the cleaning industry rely heavily on CDC guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Knowing what the virus can and cannot do is critical to knowing how to prevent the spread. Brian said conflicting information from the CDC has caused them to go into every scenario preparing for the worst and covering as many bases as possible.

“The CDC, I feel, has just covered themselves all the way around: ‘It’s on the surfaces and it doesn’t last long, oh it does last. It’s not airborne, now it’s airborne,’” Brian said. “We just go into every job like it’s Defcon 10. At this point, we hear you, but we’re going into everything like it’s a life and death situation.”

As with many frontline workers, personal protective equipment is always a concern. For the Williams’, that became a little more complicated due to their classification.

“The biggest challenge at the beginning of this was that we always have a certain amount of PPE that we always carry for our terminal and critical, but we are not identified as essential because we are janitors,” he said. “To get the 95 masks, suits and shoe covers, we were really worried about that.”

Many of their contracts such as Bridgestone and Augusta Industrial Services were qualified as essential and able to streamline a supply of PPE for Briten.

Owning a business and being a mother is a difficult task under normal circumstances. Tennille underwent her final surgery in September just to be greeted with a national health crisis a few months later. She said their faith has been a huge part of navigating these rough waters.

‘There’s been a lot of hell and back. Me finding out that I had cancer hit (Brian) hard, so his focus wasn’t in the direction of the business. It basically stayed above ground from the time I had surgery until January,” she said. “There were many, many tears and I prayed every day, ‘Lord, save our business.’ One thing Brian kept saying to me was, ‘God wouldn’t continue to keep our business alive if he didn’t want to use it for something.”

For Brian and Tennille, the reason their family and business survived was because of their ability to help others.

“God always uses the bad to have something good happen. I feel like he’s blessed our business during this time so we could help others and go in and provide safety and peace of mind,” Tennille said. “That is our story. There have been some really bad times and it’s because of God that we were able to pull through.”

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