"Sept. 11 was a paradigm shift," said panelist Barry L. Zubrow, chief administrative officer for Goldman Sachs in New York. "We need to plan for events that go well beyond 9-11, events that might follow weapons of mass destruction or biological attacks."

Though their offices are located on the East side of lower Manhattan and didn't bear the brunt of the aftermath, Mr. Zubrow said the organization decided there was a need to locate its workforce outside of lower Manhattan.

The company is planning to move a portion of its equity trading staff to a 1.5-million square-foot space in Jersey City, he said, that will house support areas of the investment management division and part of the equities trading operation.

At a business continuity planning session recently hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank, Mr. Zubrow said regulators noted three key vulnerabilities:

? Contingency planning generally did not account for region-wide events.

? The financial industry and the regulatory community need to think about vulnerabilities of concentrations of people from both marketing and geography standpoints.

? Organizations need to make sure they have the right models for contingency plans and they need to test those plans.

"Nowhere have we had a robust set of testing across all of our different institutions and in the higher marketplace." As a result, he said, Goldman Sachs has encouraged industry-wide testing "reminiscent of the period leading up to Y2K."

Donna L. Makow, senior vice president with Marsh in New York, said the company's plans in place on Sept. 11 were designed with "the worst case scenario" in mind.

Those plans, however, "as well orchestrated as they might have been, were definitely stretched beyond anybody's imagination," she said.

At Marsh, Ms. Makow said, there were 1,900 colleagues, contractors and guests in One World Trade Center on Sept. 11. The latest number of those lost in the event, she said, is 294.

Of that number 126 were technology specialists. Other areas affected were the Guy Carpenter reinsurance arm, finance, claims, risk lost control and other business lines, she explained.

By noon of that day, an emergency call center was set up, she explained. Management posted a list of colleagues and began phoning families to find out if they had heard from loved ones at One World Trade Center. A list was soon compiled from printed lists and families were contacted.

A family center was "up and running" by Friday morning, she said. It stayed open for nearly two weeks and offered many services, including regular updates from City officials, a dining area, a chapel, day-care facilities, information about benefits and social security, and vans making trips to Ground Zero.

Ms. Makow said Marsh is broadening its contingency plans to include guidelines for leaving the city as well as evacuating the building. The company also is working to establish designated meeting places for employees and places for family members to gather.

Cross-training and back-up plans are being implemented with employees "to make sure that we've got the knowledge base dispersed about the organization and not kept in silos."