In times of disaster, it is very difficult for organizations to execute their business continuity plans. How can businesses expect to implement a cost-effective recovery when they have no idea how severe the damage is, or how long it will be before they can have access to their mission critical facilities which house their core business and service operations? In many cases, a thorough site or damage assessment is not immediately possible after the fire has been put out, the water contained, the hazardous materials identified or the environment stabilized.
Access to, and assessment of the facility and its contents, may be delayed for at least 24 – 72 hours due to the possible loss of structural integrity, necessary forensic investigation, or existing or potential toxic contamination. In losses such as the Philadelphia Meridian Plaza fire; the bombing of both the World Trade Center (1993) and the Oklahoma City Alfred Murrah Federal building (1995); the Chicago downtown flooding; natural disasters such as the Midwest, California and Pacific Northwest floods; Hurricanes Hugo, Andrew, Marilyn and Fran; and the Northridge earthquake, those companies, government agencies and institutions who had positioned pre-qualified restoration partners, and had actually incorporated delayed access scenarios into their recovery plans, were among the first to recover.
Choose an Appropriate Restoration Contractor
When pre-determining a restoration contractor as part of your recovery team, it is important to understand what their credentials should be; how they will interact with your facilities design and construction organization; what their relationship with your insurance carrier and broker has been; how quickly they can mobilize the necessary equipment, personnel (including technical specialists), and resources required for a local, regional or national disaster; what restoration issues they will be dealing with, and whether they have a good understanding of your business continuity concerns.
Reconstruction of existing structures after a disaster-related loss is a specialized form of construction. It is a situation that presents a myriad of complications, through which the contractor must be equal parts investigator, team builder, damage assessor, documenter, innovator and restoration specialist.
Choosing a construction partner as part of your business continuity team can appear to be a daunting task – however, if you take the time to review the following criteria, you will put yourself in a more successful position. First, your contractor should have the proper experience base, proper insurance coverage and bonding capacity. With the rising costs of insurance coverage, many contractors are intentionally limiting their policy’s coverage in specific areas in order to stay competitive. You will also want a contractor who has a depth of resources and mechanisms in place to meet your facility’s response requirements so they can deliver the necessary resources wherever and whenever they are needed.
Establish Criteria for Damage Assessment
When performing a damage assessment, it is important to set criteria that will be the basis for the evaluation. There are many reconstruction firms that will fix the building for X dollars. This provides no gain to the building owners or authorized facilities representative when trying to determine the value of the loss to negotiate with their carrier for settlement. The contractor needs to be prepared to provide a detailed assessment on a trade-by-trade and location-by-location basis. The costs for repair should follow that method of delineation and will make the negotiation with the carrier or other responsible body much more manageable.
The building owner or authorized facility representative should also pre-determine the form of contract that will be used for a post-disaster restoration. This can include a contractor rate sheet for all trades. By pre-determining this tool, you can cut down the negotiation process dramatically and ensure that both parties are privy to, and comfortable with, the owner’s needs and the contract’s tenets.
Photo-documenting the loss is an important damage assessment step. Liability insurance on properties that have a damage history is getting harder to obtain because of the potential risk. Documentation ensures that corrective measures were performed accurately and completely. Disclosure laws in most states require owners to provide full disclosure to the history and remedies for a problem. Without documentation there is a risk of property devaluation for unknown issues and stigma. Lastly, documentation is utilized to substantiate warranties.
Mitigate the Overall Loss and Exposures
Once the affected site is approved for entry by the appropriate municipal authorities and the site/damage assessment begins, the building owner or authorized facility representative and their restoration contractor must take several steps to mitigate their overall loss and exposures. First, it is important to secure the exterior of the structure and its boundaries, as damaged sites can become an attractive nuisance that can put the curious at risk. Also, tenants may desire to re-enter the structure when it is not safe to do so. Even if a structure is sound there may be other environmental hazards that have not been contained. In the case of fire damage, the burned materials or contents can emit hazardous gasses.
Fire Loss
Since each fire leaves its own unique chemical fingerprint in the soot, the chemical components are determined by what burned, in what quantities, and under what conditions. The initial damage assessment should always address both indirect, as well as direct, fire-damage areas. Contamination such as fire combustion by-products may lie hidden behind the obvious physical damage to the structure. These by-products are locked into the soot that condenses on all cool surfaces. Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC) plastic, for example, when heated generates hydrogen chloride gas. This gas combined with water forms hydrochloric acid, a very corrosive chemical. Also, a common cushion material, polyurethane foam, yields hydrogen cyanide when burned. Even fire-extinguishing chemicals can generate such by-products as hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid and hydrogen bromide. Your restoration contractor and their team of specialists must be able to identify these contaminants in their damage assessment and recommend decontamination procedures.
Water Damage
In addition, in situations that include standing water or moist, humid conditions in a facility for more than 24 – 48 hours, your restoration contractor will be concerned about the development and growth of mold and mildew spores. This affects not only the structure, HVAC systems and critical contents such as documents and magnetic media, but can produce sick building syndrome as well.
The American Council for Government Hygienists (ACGH) cites visible mold growth as a potential human health threat. Source removal is essential to eliminating the health threat of mold growth, and although biocide chemical applications can stop mold amplification, dormant spores can continue to pose a health risk. Controlled demolition, removal and disposal, and methodical decontamination cleaning carried out under engineering controls and negative air pressure conditions are the appropriate measures for dealing with the threat of mold growth.
Your restoration contractor’s special technical division for this type of remediation will have trained personnel, working in appropriate personnel protective equipment, available to perform these necessary procedures. The efficacy of the decontamination process can be confirmed by scientific sampling. Your restoration contractor must also understand the “science of drying” and have available to them large volumes of the most sophisticated dehumidification and monitoring equipment necessary to ensure effective results and elimination of environmental concerns. Desiccant dehumidification equipment and state-of-the-art technology, like restorative air wash, are examples of the equipment and procedures that are utilized in eliminating contaminants and odors that result from combustion, flooding and other effects of heat and moisture.
If critical electronic equipment remains in a moist, humid environment, severe corrosion can occur within 48 -72 hours. It will be necessary in most cases for your pre-qualified restoration contractor to provide proper mitigation and safeguarding actions (e.g. corrosion control) to protect affected surfaces and prevent long-term damage. In addition, factors such as the volume of equipment, decisions on restoration versus replacement, insurance coverage issues, and re-certification requirements can delay the complete cleaning process, so it is helpful to have experienced electronic technical specialists, who sometimes are brought to the loss as consultants, provide their expertise regarding these issues.
Restoration as a Cost-Effective Solution
Some of the latest ISO 9000 approved electronics restoration procedures include using static-dissipative workstations and flooring, specially developed chemical processes, and ultra fast vacuum-drying techniques. It is important for your pre-qualified restoration contractor to have close cooperation with manufacturers and services representatives through the restoration and certification process in order to safeguard maintenance and warranty agreements.
Following a fire, flood or other form of contamination, manufacturing equipment, machinery, mechanical parts and work in process can suffer irreparable damage from corrosion, abrasion or seizure. Immediate stabilization by your restoration contractor’s technical specialists can be accomplished by protecting affected surfaces and through effective environmental control. This can often alleviate the need for expensive or time-consuming replacement.
Not only can restoration achieve considerable financial savings – up to 90% compared to the replacement cost – but more importantly, it is the quickest way of ensuring business resumption and the retention of your business clients. For example, important manufacturing items such as key tooling, injection molds, test fixtures and even work in process may take months to replace even if the up-to-date drawings are available. Interim decontamination and restoration may allow manufacturing operations to continue while replacements are obtained, and so restoration offers a valuable, cost-effective solution.
Vital Records
Although many of your vital records may be backed up and stored off-site, your facility probably houses numerous paper records containing information critical to the continuation of your business. Those documents could include recently updated asset inventories, financial or claim documentation, personnel or medical records, vendor contracts and agreements, manufacturing specifications, formulas, research and development information, compliance documentation, special permits, building engineering drawings and updates, equipment operating and repair reference manuals, plant meetings, or courthouse documentation. In addition, there is always some form of “critical work in progress” that has not yet been backed up, remaining in your facility each night. In addition to the inventory systems associated with a vital records management program, emergency retrieval and restoration of those records (regardless of the media format) must be addressed in business continuity planning.
Your restoration contractor should have a specialized technical division for vital records recovery that provides retrieval of the damaged items and state-of-the-art recovery and restoration procedures including vacuum-freeze drying, thermal-freeze drying, molecular sieve, microwave technology, irradiation technology, as well as more standard forms of remediation such as low vapor-pressure dehumidification. In addition, a computerized inventory management system, which can give you rapid access to materials undergoing restoration, can be very helpful when a specific damaged item is needed.
In many cases, special handling of records is required due to the fragile nature of their composition. Technicians handling vital records must be trained on the handling, packing and recording of valuable instruments such as stocks, medical records and library material to ensure that materials are returned in the same proper order as received for treatment. Because information systems are critical to your ability to serve your customers and operate your business, timely retrieval of information from hard drives, magnetic tapes, floppy disks and CD-ROMs is essential to full business restoration, and it is critical that restoration technicians handling these damaged systems are trained to utilize state-of-the art restoration procedures.
The road from disaster to recovery can best be navigated by utilizing the best in restoration. And to attain the most efficient and cost-effective recovery plan, it is best to invest time and attention to the steps that will ensure that if and when disaster strikes, you know that your business will be in the best possible hands for a timely and successful recovery.
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