I ask if this even remotely compares with anything else in his long professional experience.

“This one stands far apart,” he answers, somberly, noting that no other catastrophe has involved injury and loss of life on this scale. Then, too, “it's deliberate and heinous in nature,” he says. “It's beyond wind-blown roofs and dented cars. It's personal. It's visceral. That's what makes this different.”

With us is Robert K. Meyers, an executive vice president who, as the firm's head of loss adjusting operations in North America, is the point man on client losses related to the WTC incident. A longtime brokerage executive, first with Johnson & Higgins, then with Marsh, Mr. Meyers has been through Northridge and Andrew, the most severe catastrophes in industry history before this and the ones that most tested the industry's ability to respond.

“What's completely different here,” he says, “is that with Northridge and Andrew the industry got on it right away. But here, people are numb and getting them to react is, understandably, a challenge.”

In the case of GAB, what's supposed to be a front-line, quick-response team is, after all, only human, adds Joe Zubretsky, and they had to get through all the emotional trauma that the rest of the industry was going through.

“We had to be sensitive to our people,” he says, “but, on the other hand, this is when our clients need us most. This is our time. It's our calling.”

To answer that call, GAB Robins took a newly-developed catastrophe response resource deployment model and “put it into high gear,” says Mr. Zubretsky. It also rechristened the model “911″ to memorialize the event and to remind its people of the humanitarian aspects of the effort, he says.

GAB Robins has some investigators on the ground at the site of the disaster working on high-end commercial claims, but access is understandably slow and limited. They won't be surprised if the entire loss adjustment process for their high-end commercial clients stretches well beyond the 12-18-month average.

As for smaller commercial and personal lines claims, “we're still trying to scope it,” says Mr. Meyers.

Ahead, too, there are fundamental yet complex insurance issues to be faced–issues that stand in stark contrast to those presented by, say, a weather-related catastrophe, where the event is fairly contained and coverage is understood.

There will be the inevitable haggling over policy wordings on terrorism and war, of course, but beyond that, says Mr. Zubretsky, there are derivative effects of this macroeconomic event that will reverberate across the country and around the world for some time to come.

The entire American economy, after all, virtually came to a halt after the terrorist attacks. What that might mean in terms of basic policy application issues for business interruption claims staggers the imagination.

For those businesses literally blasted away on Sept. 11, the picture might be clear enough. But assessing the collateral damage takes you far from Ground Zero through vacant hotel lobbies and empty airplanes and airports to darkened theater marquees and restaurants without diners.

“There's just an imponderable number of business interruption issues,” says Mr. Meyers. “And the echo effect is throughout the world.”

Overall, industry response has been phenomenal, according to Mr. Zubretsky, who called it “one of the quickest, most focused responses I've ever seen.”

Mr. Meyers sees a whole new time line in terms of a catastrophic event.

“We're breaking new ground in resource deployment for a cat,” he says. “There's been nothing like it before. It's a new learning experience, a new environment.”

Adds Mr. Zubretsky: “This is a test we've never taken before. We're up to it, but there's nothing to compare it to.”

Few would argue that the task ahead, like the event itself, is incomparable.

Thomas J. Slattery is NU's Executive Editor At Large. He can be reached at [email protected].

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, October 8, 2001. Copyright 2001 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.

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