On Sunday, October 26, Florette Hudkins, of San Diego, CA, came home from an early breakfast to find five messages on her answering machine. She already knew what they were about -- the smoke hovering in the air was a dead giveaway that the forest fires spreading through southern California had finally arrived. Hudkins, who manages San Diego's fire claims section for State Farm Insurance, immediately set to work calling the team members on her phone tree and telling them to head to the local State Farm office immediately.
"About twenty of us met there at nine-thirty a.m. and started organizing groups of people to take calls from customers, to call any co-workers who didn't know yet, and to go to the local evacuation centers to speak with policyholders," says Hudkins, who has the matter-of-fact demeanor you'd expect of someone who's spent the last two decades handling fire damage claims. "These initial meetings are about how we can be visible and available to our customers at times like this."
"Times like this" refers, of course, to disasters, when insurance companies such as State Farm send catastrophe teams to the site of calamities to hold emergency meetings with agents, claims adjusters, and customers, typically on no more than 24 or 48 hours' notice. They are the ultimate short-term meetings; as such, the stories of these emergency-meetings experts, who often travel hundreds of miles to organize their gatherings, offer much knowledge for today's planners on how to make do with limited resources in an era of ever-shrinking lead times.
Calamity Janes and Joes
The insurance business is one of the largest industries in the country, employing around two million people, according to Carolyn Gorman, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute in New York City. From sales gatherings, to educational conferences, to emergency disaster meetings, the industry generates thousands of events. Claims adjusters are the main actors in the catastrophe teams that converge at scenes of destruction, providing support to victims who hold relevant insurance policies -- called "insureds" for short.
"Claims adjusters come in after the loss has occurred to investigate what is covered under the terms of the insurance contract," explains Gorman. When a disaster occurs and adjusters are dispatched from across the country, catastrophe teams -- consisting of adjusters, local sales agents, management, and logistics personnel -- hold several orientation meetings in local hotels, offices, even schools, to become familiar with local coverage issues.
The logistics of a catastrophe team meeting entail many of the same elements as any other meeting -- booking hotel and conference space, flights, rental cars, and so on -- but there are a few differences. Typically the planner (whose title could be "deployment manager," "catastrophe team leader," or the like) does not book adjusters' travel arrangements. Those are made by the adjusters themselves or by the insurance company's central travel department. Nor are planners typically involved in F and B arrangements; catastrophe team members -- who may stay on site 30 days or more -- handle meals on their own, often cooking in the kitchenettes found in the Residence Inns, Embassy Suites, or other extended-stay properties they prefer.
The on-site briefings and orientation sessions attended by adjusters, management staff, local agents, and other insurance personnel are publicized the old-fashioned way -- by phone -- and sometimes e-mail. But when going out into the field to meet with customers, planners may make announcements in newspapers and on local TV or radio stations, or -- if local infrastructure has been devastated -- by simply parking their mobile response units (trailers plastered with highly visible company logos) in hard-hit areas where they're most likely to be seen by passersby.
Any number of disasters could draw catastrophe teams into the field, says Gorman, including earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, wildfires, or other calamities that affect densely populated areas. In the recent example of southern California, "When the wildfires started burning, companies that knew they had a lot of insureds in affected areas mobilized adjusters," explains Gorman. "In many cases they came with checkbooks, so they could give immediate support to those who needed a place to stay and money to meet essential needs. Then the adjusters assessed the loss and created a plan for reimbursement."
Into the Eye of the Storm
Full-time, dedicated catastrophe teams, with the sole responsibility of traveling from disaster to disaster coordinating emergency activities, have been a fixture of the insurance business ever since Hurricane Andrew swept through the southeastern United States in 1992, leaving $26.5 billion worth of damages in its wake. These teams are overseen by people like Roman Suarez, deployment manager for Allstate's national catastrophe team. Last September 16, five days before Hurricane Isabel was scheduled to make landfall, Suarez and his partner, Gary Burkhardt, found themselves in a series of teleconferences with team members, including adjusters in local offices in the areas most likely to be affected (in this case, Virginia and North Carolina). Based on these conversations, Allstate's catastrophe team decided to set up its initial staging area in Raleigh, NC -- close to where Isabel would likely hit, but "not in harm's way," as Suarez puts it.
After the company determined how many claims adjusters it would likely need, Suarez and Burkhardt studied their database of adjusters to see who was available for initial deployment, then e-mailed 50 people, including a cadre of managers, asking that they report to a meeting in Raleigh at five o'clock the next evening. Those deployed made their own arrangements for driving or flying in via Allstate's travel department in Northbrook, IL, while Suarez found a Hilton property -- the chain has a longstanding relationship with Allstate -- in Raleigh with 50 rooms available for the next 10 days, plus four conference rooms. In the meantime, other team members coordinated several 90-minute conference calls with sales agents in Virginia and North Carolina, in order to explain the company's overall strategy for dealing with Isabel, provide emergency phone numbers, and answer agents' questions and concerns.
Upon arriving in Isabel's disaster zone, the Allstate catastrophe team used the conference rooms for orientation meetings with adjusters and, once the hurricane hit, held emergency meetings with policyholders in mobile trailers, where customers could come in for coffee, water, and snacks while discussing their claims with adjusters, who also handed out checks. ("Some people didn't even have money to buy underwear," notes one adjuster.)
A major reason these on-the-fly meetings go smoothly on such short notice, insurance planners say, is that every team member "knows what their role is," notes Ray Stone, who as vice president of catastrophe management for Travelers Property Casualty in Hartford, CT, oversees a team of 80 disaster specialists. "Because these people are dedicated to catastrophe full time, once you call or page them they know exactly what to do."
In the case of September 11, 2001, for example, those on Stone's catastrophe team quickly figured out that, with U.S. airspace on lockdown, some staffers would have to drive from as far away as Florida and Texas to get to Manhattan within 48 hours. Even so, Travelers' on-site catastrophe, or "cat," vans (custom-built, 34-foot Winnebagos equipped with phones, computer stations, generators, even satellites) were up and running near the World Trade Center by the next day. In a pinch -- say, when power lines are down -- the vans can even be used for catastrophe team briefings.
Forty-Eight Hours
We know all about your own planning challenges, like how difficult it is to find available hotel space when you've got only four weeks until your meeting. But before you feel sorry for yourself, imagine having just two days -- the typical turnaround time for Ray Stone and other catastrophe-meeting planners. "With hurricanes and other disasters where we have advance warning," Stone says, "we try to get in [to the area] at least a day ahead of the storm, before air travel is disrupted and local hotels fill up with other insurance catastrophe teams and residents who have left their homes." Despite such last-minute scrambling, "We typically don't have a problem finding space," he adds.
How do catastrophe team planners pull this off? In many instances, it's through close-knit partnerships formed over the years with suppliers. For instance, Marriott has been a strategic partner for Travelers since 2001, explains Porsche Pettiford, director of national accounts for Marriott. "Lots of other insurance companies need space, but they don't all have a global, strategic relationship," she says. "Our hotels are told throughout the year that if a catastrophe should hit, Travelers is a priority" for room blocks. She adds that "we typically find as many as sixty rooms in a particular market" -- sometimes split between two properties -- "in twenty-four hours or less."
Even if your company doesn't have preferred vendor relationships with properties in every city, you can still learn from Travelers' example. Says Pettiford, "The more planners know about their organization's meeting needs and the better they communicate them, the better hoteliers can assist them. Continued dialogue about what kinds of meetings would be appropriate for a particular property, for instance, or whether we can negotiate specific packages for your company, is especially helpful."
There is other knowledge to be gained from these masters of disaster. No matter what kind of meeting they're running -- from a sit-down orientation session in a conference room, to a stand-up briefing in a hotel lobby or parking lot, to a last-minute gathering in a 34-foot, custom-built "cat" van -- catastrophe team organizers are highly flexible, prepared, and decisive -- qualities that are as valuable in a boardroom as they are in an emergency zone. And while disaster specialists travel upwards of 200 days a year, often working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week when on site, they live for these challenges. "It's a really cool operation," says State Farm's Hudkins of her disaster team. "It's nice to see that when [tragedies] like this happen, people really do care."