In the wake of disaster | Floods, fires, employee deaths: Could your business withstand any of these potentially crippling events? Are you sure?

In 18 short minutes last fall, the business Michael Levandowski spent years building came perilously close to collapsing.

In an attempt to fix a minor leak, a repairman over-tightened a crucial bolt on the sprinkler system located in a third-floor storage area above LeRoux Kitchen, Levandowski's Portland kitchenware store. The sprinkler pipe immediately separated, and within seconds the sprinkler system discharged an estimated 120,000 gallons of water into the building's interior. The effect, says Levandowski, was like a freight train barreling through the old post-and-beam building.

The incident occurred around noon on Oct. 11. At 7 p.m. that night, when Levandowski arrived in Portland from Martha's Vineyard, where he runs his flagship kitchen store, water still was flowing out the store's front door. Inside, there was up to a foot of standing water. As the water rolled through the building, it picked up dust and dirt that turned it a brownish tea color, staining thousands of boxes of inventory. "Your first impulse," says Levandowski, "is to say, 'Let's get some paper towels and Windex and shine it up ˆ— it's only water.' I thought we would be reopened for Christmas. It was only after I got fully over the initial response that I realized we would be lucky if we were open by spring."

Due to what he describes as luck rather than particularly savvy business strategy, LeRoux was well insured, so the million-dollar cost of the cleanup and restoration will be covered. Had the coverage not been up to par, Levandowski is certain that he would have lost not only the Portland store, but his Martha's Vineyard location, which he founded in 1986, as well.

Even with the coverage, though, more than five months later, LeRoux Kitchen remains closed; a soft opening is planned for early April, with the official grand opening scheduled for May 1. Levandowski missed the crucial holiday retail season, and with every additional day that passes he worries about his customers finding alternate sources for Le Creuset cookware, Wusthof knives and Japanese mandolines. "Portland is incredibly supportive," Levandowski says. "We got a few letters and notes from customers. But I still think it's going to take a year to recover [sales volume] ˆ— and there's no insurance for that."

Like Levandowski, other entrepreneurs who have experienced business disasters recount months of wrangling with insurers, inspectors, adjustors and other representatives of officialdom. They tell tales of loyal employees, supportive vendors and customers who, if they're kept informed, are willing to come back. They hint at the emotional toll such a disaster can take, both personally and professionally. And they share a uniform message for their fellow owners and managers: Think ahead.

"It's impossible to prepare for everything ˆ— accidents will happen," says Paul Worth, president of Windham-based Sebago Scales Co. In 2001, a Sebago Scales employee, Mark Betters, was killed in a workplace accident. "What you need to do is be in a position to minimize injuries. The only way to do that is to have not only a safety program in place, but to review that safety program if not daily, at least weekly."

Worth's comments are specifically related to on-the-job injuries, but replace "safety" with "insurance" or "data backup" and the message is the same. "Unfortunately," he adds, "safety is kind of taken for granted until something happens."

Trauma and memories
What happened to Jim Soule and the staff of A-Best Window in South Portland was a one-two punch. On the morning of Oct. 10, 2002 ˆ— something survivors of business disasters share is a near-photographic memory of the dates and times of their catastrophe ˆ— Soule arrived at his showroom to find what he describes as a "sea of kerosene" on the floor, the result of a malfunctioning heater pump. Soule called his heating company, which advised him to unplug the heater immediately, then call the fire department and, due to the size of the kerosene spill, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

According to Soule, Maine DEP subcontracted the cleanup operation to the South Portland office of ENPRO Services Inc., a Newburyport, Mass. company that specializes in oil and hazardous waste remediation. "They analyzed that kerosene had entered under the subfloor, where fiberglass insulation was installed, and they were determining whether it had actually seeped into the earth underneath the building," recalls Soule. "They began to dismember the flooring under the area where the kerosene stove was sitting, and imprudently grabbed a circular saw that [they used on] a floor joist with lots of nails in it. A flume of sparks went over the kerosene-soaked fiberglass insulationˆ… Instead of a cleanup, it became a fire. Within 45 seconds, the building was totally engulfed, and we watched it burn." No one was injured in the fire, but the building was gutted.

Soule immediately went into problem-solving mode, determining whether there was room at his Scarborough factory to set up a temporary office. He got the phone company to forward calls from the office number to the factory, and put a message on the storyboard sign in front of the burned building indicating that A-Best was still open. "Dealing with the fire allowed me to focus my energies not on what has happened ˆ— there's no use wringing your hands ˆ— but what do we do to get back on track," he says. "Planning for the future does a lot of good."

That same night, Soule and his sales staff used flashlights to search the charred remains of the building, which is still standing, to recover customer records and contracts. Remarkably, they were able to find enough bits and pieces of charred paper ˆ— Soule still keeps a binder of charred records on his desk ˆ— to reconstruct the accounts of all the customers who were currently under contract for window installations. With no offsite data backup ˆ— a situation the company immediately remedied ˆ— the account reconstruction effort was a lengthy, labor-intensive process.

For Soule, talking about the fire and its aftermath in a recent interview was a surprisingly emotional experience. More than the trauma of watching the business he started in 1985 burn, it was the memory of the support and generosity of his friends, colleagues and neighbors that made his eyes fill. The friend who quietly replaced the Bowdoin chair Soule's parents had given him upon his graduation, the stranger who stopped her car in front of the building the day after the fire just to give Soule a hug ˆ— these are the stories that bring the experience back to him most directly.

Since March 28, 2003, A-Best Window has been fully operational, with a new office and showroom strategically located just two doors down from the old building. The company ended the year with a 20% increase in sales over its previous best year, which Soule attributes at least in part to customers' appreciation of the investment the company clearly was making in its future. A-Best also made a concerted effort to do print and broadcast advertising during its down time, in order to keep customers informed of its continued existence.

For Soule, the most disappointing part of the experience has been his experience with ENPRO, whose insurer he says has not yet paid A-Best's insurer. Soule filed suit against ENPRO last fall for damages, and the case is currently in the discovery stage. "The actual cause [of the fire] is still being contested ˆ— it's under investigation," according to David Cowie, ENPRO's chief operating officer. "Regardless of the cause it was definitely an unfortunate situation."

"A catalyst for major change"
Though safety was certainly important to Worth of Sebago Scales and his employees, it wasn't at the top of the list. That changed when Betters and another employee, Thomas Boughter Jr., were injured ˆ— Betters, fatally ˆ— in an accident at the G.E. Goding & Son Inc. concrete plant in Lincoln.

Sebago Scales inspects and calibrates large, industrial scales onsite at its clients' plants. On June 21, 2001, Betters and Boughter were attempting to hang chains from the shackles of a hopper at the Goding plant. Normally, Worth says, the hopper would be accessible from a set of stairs. In this case, the door leading to the stairway was locked, so the workers improvised and got into the bucket of a front-end loader, which lifted them up to the height of the shackles. Though Worth declined to discuss details of the incident, a Bangor Daily News story reported that the front-end loader operator's foot slipped from the brake onto the gas. The front-end loader "lurched into the wall," according to the story, and "the men in the bucket were caught between the bucket and the wall."

"It was an accident ˆ— it was an area that we should not have been in," says Worth, who was on the road at the time and got a call from the office shortly after the accident occurred. "We should not have been in the bucket loader ˆ— it was probably poor judgment."

As Worth describes it, the incident was a catalyst for major change at Sebago Scales. "There's only six of us ˆ— anything that happens to any of us first of all is taken very personally," he says. "From an operational standpoint, all of my employees are key to the organization."

In the incident's immediate aftermath, Worth's concern was for the employees themselves, and their families. But soon thereafter his attention turned to how to prevent anything like it from happening again. "We immediately put together a safety program that [considered] this incident and any other ˆ— we had a brainstorming session of any other potential injury that could occur, and addressed each one of these, and put it in writing," Worth says.

Worth involved Sebago Scales' technicians in the development of the safety manual, and he also gave them the authority to stop working at a client site if safety parameters aren't met. "They're not going to walk off the job literally and keep the customer from operating, but the customer knows that he has got to correct the situation before we continue," he says. "I'd rather not do the job if I'm putting the guys in harm's way ˆ— the money is not worth it."

Sebago Scales and G.E. Goding were eventually fined ˆ— Goding in excess of $40,000 ˆ— by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for the incident. Sebago Scales' workers' compensation company, Portland-based Maine Employers Mutual Company, advised Worth on setting up a safety program ˆ— all employees meet every Monday morning to discuss both near misses in the previous week and potential safety issues in the upcoming week ˆ— and set deadlines for portions of a safety manual to be written. "That put a little strain on our company, but it did work out well for getting it in the hands of our guys," says Worth.

Experiencing that kind of cooperation from an insurer is foreign to Levandowski of LeRoux Kitchen, who ultimately hired a public insurance adjustor to act as his advocate in the claim process. While he expected his insurer to act as a business partner, the reality was that the insurer simply planned to abide by the terms of Levandowski's policy ˆ— which he, like Soule, had never read cover-to-cover. "I'm a very organized individual, a good note-taker, and I figured that with the help of my broker and the insurance company's adjustor I could file the claim myself," he says. "But I realized I was wrong, and that the language barrier was huge. I didn't consider myself illiterate, but I didn't understand what the hell [the insurance company's adjustor] was saying."

If there's one point he emphasizes above all others, Levandowski says, it's that "if you don't understand your policy, you can go from being a very successful business in town to not being in business."