How firms coped after Hugo - Hurricane Hugo

Nation's Business, April, 1990 by Mary McElveen

How Firms Coped After Hugo

Michael Allen's business came to a near standstill after Hurricane Hugo slammed into Charleston, S.C., last fall, but it wasn't long before his entrepreneurial skills helped him recover.

Most of the work done by Coastal Engineering and Technology Inc., where he is president and principal owner, involves testing soils and materials at construction projects. But the emphasis in Hugo's wake was on debris removal and rebuilding - not construction from scratch - and Coastal Engineering found itself with little work for its 15 employees.

Allen volunteered to help in the cleanup effort in Mt. Pleasant, the Charleston suburb where he lives, and it soon became obvious to his managerial eye that the project was plagued by serious inefficiencies. He recognized that while his company lacked specific experience in disaster-cleanup work, it was well-grounded in other critical factors needed in recovery efforts - management know-how, negotiating skills, and an ability to plan, coordinate, and monitor multifaceted projects.

Eager to get their town back in order, Mt. Pleasant officials accepted Allen's offer to provide the services of his firm at an hourly rate. Coastal Engineering wrote specifications for 18 areas of the town, participated in pre-bid conferences and contractor selection, and supervised the four-month cleanup. Allen, who founded his testing company with four employees six years ago, says, "If you have good employees who are well-rounded and basically smart and you point them in a new direction and explain the scope of the work, they'll do a good job for you."

The Mt. Pleasant cleanup project, he says, "confirmed to me that we have a top-quality team. The experience gave us the confidence to know that we have perform in other service areas. The key then was to determine what other areas we could apply our specialties to." The company has expanded its operations to include environmental services and structural inspections of homes, and it is seeking other areas for diversification.

The experiences of Coastal Engineering and other Charleston area firms in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo provide some insights into one of the greatest strenghts of smaller firms, the ability to adjust rapidly and efficiently to changing conditions, including those caused by natural disasters.

That ability was critical to the survival of a wide range of enterprises in Hugo's destructive path.

In the coastal community of Garden City, S.C., Garden City Realty Inc. came up with a novel idea of offset losses incurred when storm-damaged properties had to be withdrawn from the rental market. The realty company teamed up with a local construction firm in forming GCR Construction Co. to restore the damaged properties. "We had the customers - the homeowners whose properties were damaged or destroyed - and the construction company had the building expertise," says Judy Walton, office manager for the realty firm.

Wade Faucette, owner of a service station in Charleston, says the need for major reconstruction helped him make a decision about the future of his business. Operating out of a wooden shack as a temporary office, he converted the space that had been used for two service bays into a convenience store. "It's getting harder to find qualified mechanics," he said. "We'll be able to operate with fewer employees with a store in place of the service bays."

Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday Inc., an association of 53 golf courses and 68 hotels, faced a different kind of challenge in the wake of the storm - getting the $200-million-a-year golf industry back into business as quickly as possible and getting the word out when that was done.

The recovery efforts included those of Fred Meda, general golf-course superintendent for Myrtle Beach International, which operates a 54-hole complex. "We had about 600 trees down on the three courses, but we were determined to re-establish golf here as quickly as possible," Meda said. "In a situation like this, you find out which employees are dedicated. We had a full maintenance crew on the job by 10 o'clock the morning after the storm. We had our west course reopened two days after Hugo, and we were in full operation within 10 days."

A major worry was that guests planning to travel to the area would assume the courses would be closed for some time and would go elsewhere for their golf vacations. Douglas Hart, general manager of Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday, worked overtime to send word to a mailing list of 750,000 that the courses were mending quickly.

As a result of those efforts, he says, reservations for golf packages stayed strong despite the massive publicity given the destruction that the storm caused in the area.

Hart says that the most lasting effect of the storm will be improved scores for those using the courses: "There will be fewer trees in their way when they're coming out of the rough. Their scores will improve."

When Tommy Condon, owner of an Irish pub, looked over the list of storm damage at his establishment, he found that he had to replace the freezers, refrigerators, ovens, floor, ceiling, roof, and furnishings. He saw the rebuilding as an opportunity to improve on the old decor, so he went to Ireland to obtain the materials for that task.