The Ronan Agency: Exercises in Empathy

Jeanne Heisler, president of The Ronan Agency in Bricktown, N.J., was well aware of the pending storm. A volunteer on the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security & Preparedness Financial Services Sector Work group, she took part in frequent conference calls in the days before Sandy made landfall.

Realizing the severity of what was about to hit the Garden State, Heisler sent word to clients she thought would be most exposed to and her colleagues in the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers Association of New Jersey. All the while, she put her own contingency plans in motion to secure her home and office, both located a mile-and-a-half inland from the bay.

With an emergency generator at the ready, Heisler was ready to run the agency from her home, and turned the office phones on for auto pick-up. By 11 a.m. Monday clients were already calling, and that day's high winds and rain were just the preamble to the disaster that would follow. As the storm closed in, the power went out, leaving the Jersey shore in darkness.

The first call she received at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday was from a policyholder living just a few blocks from the bay, whose first floor was flooded. Trapped on the second floor, she had called the local police, who told her that there would be no rescues until after the storm had passed.

By daylight, the heartbreak of destroyed property and shattered lives soon became apparent. Trees were down around Heisler's home, and through photos shared over social media she realized the extent of the devastation. Travel was difficult as emergency services warned people to stay off the roads.

Customers calling in claims to her office that morning were in shock, she says. Without power, most were unaware of the massive damage outside their own neighborhoods.

By mid-week the agency's staff of nine found themselves working from her kitchen table, calling customers back on their cell phones and accessing the agency's records through a web-based system. Heisler says while one staffer made certain to get back to customers within 20 minutes, others checked e-mails and accessed client records, printing out and reviewing the information before reconnecting with clients and submitting their claims.

With the exception of a few downed trees, the agency's office suffered no damage, but the power outage kept it closed for about two weeks.

Between Tuesday and Sunday, the agency fielded 500 phone calls, which Heisler says worked out to about 10 to 15 calls every half-hour. Despite their best efforts, she says what they failed to do was commiserate with their clients as much as she would have liked.

“We had so many calls coming in so fast, we felt bad that we could not spend more time with them,” she concedes. While this was due to no lack of empathy, “there was never enough time to tell them it will get better. People were so shell-shocked. It was pure exhaustion to deal with, day-in and day-out.”

“There is nothing you can say to someone who has lost their home. It will be years before you can say their life will be better,” adds Heisler's sister, Denise Clayton, a senior vice president at the agency.

“We've always been a very community-minded business, but the way we handle clients has changed because a lot of people come in and need to talk,” she says. “We spend a lot of time being compassionate. Their emotional state has been compromised by the storm. We handle our clients with kid gloves because they are very fragile now, and need understanding.”

Garber, Atlas Fries & Assoc.: Contingency Planning at Work

On the Monday that Sandy approached the coast, Chief Operating Officer/Vice President Justin Fries of Garber, Atlas Fries & Assoc. in Oceanside, N.Y., sent a text message to the firm's some 40 employees telling them to stay home and be safe. He and two others prepared the agency's two-story office by covering equipment and furniture in case the wind broke through a window or lifted a roof seam and allowed any rain in.

As he was unable to relocate the firm's computer server on such short notice, he covered it up and surrounded it with material in hopes of blocking off any water. Tropical Storm Irene had flooded the office slightly the year before; Fries assessed that Sandy could be a little worse, but he felt his office was prepared.

At 8:30 that evening as the winds howled outside, he got a call from the alarm company: Sensors detected water coming into the building. From a closed-circuit television camera, he watched in horror as the waters from a nearby creek rose around the building for 10 minutes before the power went out.

“I thought—'Oh God, this might be the big one,'” says Fries.

When he arrived at the office on Wednesday, he found 3 feet of water had invaded the office along with sewage backup, leaving a rotten stench throughout the first floor. A disaster-recovery service was already at work securing trailers for temporary office space, but the floodwaters had fried the servers—and Fries quickly realized he would have to secure office space for the long term.

That day, however (and until Jan. 30), representatives from the agency stayed on-site to manually take information from clients outside the Oceanside office and filed it later electronically. 

During those 90 days, he recalls, “it was nothing but servicing clients and helping people where you could. I went down to several different clients to calm them down and listen to them to help get them through it, but there wasn't much else I could do.”

What he found upon visiting clients was mass destruction. He found cars with their windows down—an emergency feature for late-model autos submerged in water to let people out—covered with debris and seaweed littering the roadways. Large boats tossed about overnight now sat on homeowners' lawns or golf courses or in pools. Giant trees had fallen on houses and cars.   

And once homeowners started clearing ruined possessions from their flooded houses, piles of garbage some six feet high lined the streets.

“I would say that in retrospect I was in shock and utter disbelief,” says Fries. “I truthfully never thought we would see this type of devastation in our area.”

At his own home there was no major damage, but Fries was without power for two long weeks. With small children in the home and the days getting colder after Sandy passed, staying in the house became less of an option, and soon his family was able to move into a hotel in Manhattan (from which he commuted for a week) until he was able to hook up a portable generator to his home.

Fries' parents' home in Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn did not fare as well. They evacuated but lost one car to the rising waters, and a neighbor who had been watching their home almost lost his life in neck-high flooding.

“The entire area looked like a war zone,” says Fries. “People were walking around dazed and confused, pulling debris out of their homes.”

Restoring the house was a stressful period that put his father in the hospital with an ulcer. He is doing well now, Fries says, but “It was a crazy experience that I'm not looking forward to going through again.”

For the agency, more attention will be paid to contingency planning for future disasters. The servers, which took weeks to replace, were raised four feet above the floor “so we could have a fighting chance” in the event of another large flood, says Fries. A second set of servers for backup data storage is also in the works, as well as a predetermined alternate office space in the event of a repeated disaster.

Clayton N. Sterling Assoc.: An Island in a Sea of Devastation

The office of Clayton N. Sterling Assoc. in Seaside Park, N.J., sits one block from the shore. Preparations to protect the building began on Saturday; on Sunday, the state declared a mandatory evacuation of the barrier islands.

Jim Klagholz, its president, closed the building and left—but made a fortuitous last-minute decision to go back and take his company's workstation tower and computer. The next morning he learned the storm's devastation was worse than he had imagined as the barrier island “took a direct hit.”

Miraculously, though most of the town was laid to waste by Sandy's storm surge, burying the first three blocks of shoreside under several feet of sand, the office itself was spared, sitting on what amounted to high ground. He did not know this initially, and was relieved to find a photograph of the town on the Web that showed the office was intact. However, it would be days before he learned how lucky he was to be spared from any flooding. But the city's utilities had all been knocked offline. Ultimately, they would not come back on for another two months, and during that time, the office might as well have been swept out to sea.

Home was a different story; five miles inland in neighboring Toms River, a few trees fell around the house, but there was no damage. He was without electricity for 36 hours. Once the power came back on, his first thought was to get to work. He knew there would be claims from wind or flood. “I knew time was of the essence and I needed to be up and operating instantaneously because people would be needing advice and direction,” says Klagholz.

With a friend's help he reconnected his computer network transforming his home into a makeshift office. He and his small office staff processed around 700 claims. When customers called the agency the voice mail message informed them that the office was temporarily re-located and to leave a message. Up at 6 a.m., Klagholz retrieved 60 to 70 messages a day. He and his staff would spend days on their cell phones returning calls because Verizon could not hook-up the phone lines he needed.

The performance of his carriers has been “all over the board,” he says, with some “performing in stellar fashion.” Klagholz praised Fidelity National P&C, his flood carrier, and Encompass Insurance, for their handling of property and auto claims, with quickly contacting customers and getting adjusters out to assess damages in a timely fashion. On the Excess & Surplus lines side, FTP Inc. of Old Bridge, N.J., utilized a highly efficient claims-reporting mechanism, he says.

Klagholz harbors no illusions about moving on from Sandy any time soon. “One adjuster asked me, 'Are you ready to put this storm behind you?' I said, 'yes.' And he said, 'Don't, because you will be dealing with this for a year.'”

He learned his first lesson about backing up computer files when lightning struck the office about two-and-a-half years ago and much information was lost; as a result, Klagholz began using cloud storage for backing up his files. Sandy taught him another lesson: that he not only needed to back up the agency's data, but to have backup hardware and facilities off site. He no longer believes that the coast of New Jersey is immune from catastrophe.

“I'm kind of a conservative guy, but with the changes in the seasons, I can't help but to question whether we could be going through this again next year,” he says.