Adventures After a Hurricane Disaster

Adventures After a Hurricane Disaster
With so many hurricanes swirling around the coasts of the U.S. these days, I thought some readers might be interested in a personal story of the aftermath of one of the biggest to hit, Hurricane Charley in 2004. As I tell this story keep in mind that a great deal of good luck was involved in the success of the efforts we made at that time.

I was spending the summer in Rhode Island when, on Friday afternoon, August 13, I got news that Hurricane Charley had decimated the condo I owned in Florida, part of a modest, 32 unit complex. The irony was that the previous day I had offered the use of my condo (which is on high ground not near the water) to two friends who lived on the water, and were afraid of the storm surge, and it was they who called me on a cell phone. I was told, “Your roof has come off”. I said, “You mean some shingles blew off?”. No, they said, the roof is off, the water is pouring in and the place is a shambles.

I then traced the route of Charley and called a motel about 25 miles away in a city that had not been affected and rented a room for three weeks. I loaded my Grand Caravan with canned food, bottled water, tarps, battery lights and a porta-potty from my boat. Because of other situations I could not leave right away, but I managed to leave Tuesday morning and arrived Thursday afternoon to quite a scene: pieces of the roof, insulation, downed wires and cables, and shredded aluminum fragments everywhere. It looked like a bomb had gone off.

At that time I was a director, but not an officer of the complex. I had no management duties other than to attend a board meeting from time to time. When I pulled in that first time, I found that the Managing Director was in shock and entering the first stages of a breakdown, and two other directors were sitting on their front steps crying, completely exhausted mentally, physically and emotionally. Someone had to step up, and I decided it had to be me. There was no electricity, no phone service (not even cell phones), no sewerage because the pumps weren’t working, and no gasoline for the same reason. Every day for several days the temperature was in the 90’s with high humidity, and it rained every afternoon. Twice a day I drove around for a few minutes to get some relief from the AC in my car.

That night, in the motel room I luxuriated in air conditioning, got on the internet, watched television and took a shower; almost everyone else still at the condo complex was forced to face stifling heat and rain water still coming in. While at the motel I found from the internet that the Belfor Company was the world’s leading water-damage specialists, and the Alex Sill Company was the top rated private insurance adjuster firm in the U.S. I called their emergency numbers, found they had people already in our area and got their cell phone numbers.

The next day I rose at 5:00 AM, filled up my gas tank and had breakfast at Denny’s. I did this every day that I was there. My cell phone wouldn’t work at home, but while visiting my friends, I was told that if I stood on the diving board of their pool and faced southwest, sometimes their cell phone worked. Somehow they had found that out. I borrowed it and called a moving and storage company to remove my furniture and put it in AC storage in another city. They came the next day and did just that. The rest of that day was spent dealing with my personal homeowners insurance company, getting our stuff ready to go into storage and a thousand other things.

On Saturday my cell phone started working and I got in touch with the Belfor people and the Alex Sill people, who both agreed to meet with us immediately. I also called FEMA and arranged for one of their people to come. Within a day, we met with both companies and hired them. Sill was hired to represent us with our condominium insurance company. They were to receive a small percentage of the payout for their service, which would also include drawing up a master plan for reconstruction. The Belfor representatives said they could have a crew on site within 24 hours if we hired them and gave them a $25,000 deposit. Our treasurer wrote out the check, and Belfor said they would hold it until she told them she had transferred funds from our reserve accounts to cover it (not legal, but we did it anyway). I was also appointed Managing Director and asked to run the restoration efforts.

The FEMA guy showed up as our Belfor meeting started and agreed to hang around until it ended. I met with him later and signed contracts to have the U.S. Corps of Engineers install blue tarpaulins over our roofs, which they did. Interestingly, the FEMA drill was to make me sign an individual, multi-part form for each of the 32 units in the complex. It took me an hour just to sign all the forms, and I never heard from or saw a FEMA person again.

The next day things began to change in a hurry. Belfor put 30 workers and equipment on our site to begin the cleanup and take steps to mitigate the damage. Every unit had drenched carpeting, and one of Belfor’s first acts was to remove it to stave off mold, which is the big destroyer. They also had electronic instruments that measured the moisture content of areas of the drywall ceilings and walls, and they cut out and removed areas that failed their test standard, for the same reason. The morale of the residents improved overnight, and everyone was working together. People there realized that we were one of the few sites where work was actually going on, but now we had a new problem.

Hurricane Charley was followed by three more hurricanes, Frances, Jeanne and Ivan. Each hurricane brought more wind, which lifted the tarps, and more rain, which poured in every afternoon and evening. I had gotten my furniture out, and hadn’t waited for the Belfor people to remove my own carpeting, but this caused more misery for everyone else, and also required the successive evacuations of the work crews.

There was some comic relief in the situation. So much scrap aluminum was lying around the whole area, the remnants of carports, sheds and pool cages, that lots of people with trucks went into the business of collecting it and selling it at scrap yards. We had piles of it all around and in our pool. One day a truck pulled in, and I was asked if they could pick up the aluminum at no cost to us. I said “yes, if you start with what is in the pool”. Their crew cleaned out the pool and removed a little of what was lying on the ground, and then told me that they would be back tomorrow. Several days then went by with no sign of this original crew, when another truck and crew pulled in to see if they could have the aluminum. I said yes. After they started working, the original truck pulled in, and that guy was so incensed because he had done the real dirty work, that the two crews got in a fist-fight over the aluminum that was left. I let them sort it out.

The Sill people came in handy. We had, literally, dozens of meetings with various insurance company people – meetings that would drive a person to insanity. They issued inch-thick reports every month and kept changing the form of how they presented the data and the dollars, so that it was almost impossible to follow from one report to the next. They offered a final settlement of $248,000 early on, and we rejected it. We ended up settling for $993,000, which paid all the bills with $12,000 left over after we paid Sill. We might have survived and prevailed in these negotiations without Sill, but I doubt it. I believe the basic strategy of the insurance company was to wear us down, but they found that they couldn’t.

There were many other developments along the way, but I’ll end my story here. I flew back and forth between RI and Florida once a month from September through January, staying about a week each time, and went down full-time in January. By February, my unit was livable, and by March the whole complex was restored like new. Excuse me, I have to see what Ike is doing.