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The owner of a Spotsylvania County engineering firm realized that it was essential to keep his staff on the payroll if he was to ride out the economic storm caused by COVID-19.

“We’re a fairly specialized practice,” said Larry Welford, who started the consulting engineer and land surveying firm 20 years ago. “If you have to let those people go, they’ll find work somewhere else. To come back is an enormous task.”

Like thousands of other small businesses, he reached for the federal government’s new Paycheck Protection Program as a lifeline after clients stopped work on projects. He contacted Virginia Partners Bank and put together his application two days before the first-come, first-served program rolled out April 3.

PPP got off to a rocky start and the rules had to be refined, but Welford’s loan was among the 1.6 million approved before the $349 billion in the program ran out Thursday. Congress is expected to add to the program this week .

“It will help us stay in business,” Welford said of his loan, which was deposited into his account last week. “You just can’t build a business like mine overnight. It’s really important to me to come out the other side. Your employees are family. They have children, college, mortgages, all those things that, as an employer, you take on.”