When disaster strikes

Real Estate Weekly, Oct 10, 2001 by Elaine Misonzhnik

As president of Maxons Restorations, a repair firm that is involved in the clean up of Lower Manhattan, Damon Gersh has probably seen the worst of it. Apartment buildings covered in dust, with windows blown out, a church buried in debris, offices where human beings cannot venture without wearing a respirator mask. But Gersh admits he prefers his hard day's work to the alternatives.

"One of the things that I am a little grateful for is that this gave me something to do," he says. "We've been working 16-hour days and to some extent we are sheltered from sitting around and having to ponder the large issues of what this mean for our country. Normal for us is dealing with disaster. We were able to do something positive for the city and it helped us get back to normal."

Maxons Restorations was first conceived of by Damon's father, Max Gersh, as a door laundering and rug cleaning business. In 1947, an insurance company contacted Gersh, a trained chemist, about repairing a smoke-damaged facility and he opened a "7/24 Restorations Services" division. Since then, the firm has been handling various, now admittedly "small scale" catastrophes in the New York region -- restaurant firs, water leaks, the damage caused a few years ago by Hurricane Andrew.

But even the destruction Maxons' employees witnessed in 1999 in New Jersey, couldn't compare with the aftermath of the World Trade Center collapse.

"We have over 1,000 people working for us right now between the churches, the office buildings, the common areas, and the residences at Battery Park City," Gersh says. "It appears that we are going to have to clean tens of thousands of apartments."

When asked how much time it would take to make Lower Manhattan habitable again, he sighs.

"That's really hard to tell. I understand there are about 85 million SF of office space in the downtown area and I don't even know how much residential space is there. The clean-up effort could be going on for six months, possibly a year. There are a lot of places we haven't been yet because they don't have power."

According to Gersh, every building needs a different approach, depending on its use and the degree of damage it has suffered. He assures real estate owners and residents alike that "no job too big or too small," but his descriptions of the work Maxons' has done so far speak for themselves.

"In the churches, the job involves a lot of cleaning up of dust and debris in the lower portions of the sanctuaries and that was done on an emergency basis in order to prepare these chapels for funeral services," he explains. "Then we had to set up scaffolding to clean the ceilings and the roofs. On retail locations, we cleaned a seven-story hardware store the other day. We had to clean every hammer, every pipe, every object on every floor -- so you can imagine how much work had to be done there."

These days the company is using its entire staff, whereas in normal times only 200 Maxons employees were in Manhattan at any given moment. The day after the attack Gersh organized an emergency conference call to make sure that all the necessary supplies and all the workers firm the outer boroughs and New Jersey could be deployed to Manhattan.

He also came up with a standard, one-page contract for all jobs, changing the company's pricing policy to flat rates. Gersh plans to donate part of the proceeds to the New York Police and Firefighters' Widows and Orphans Fund.

"We just try to make it easier for people because they have a lot of decisions to make," he explains. "We are trying to provide services to as many clients as possible."

For the moment, Gersh, who has been helping people affected by natural disasters since he 16, tries to focus on the positive.

"What we do is very gratifying," he says. "We are able to come into a situation that is a mess and restore order, get things cleaned up, help people turn their lives and their businesses back on track. This was a chance for us to rise to the challenge and help our fellow New Yorkers."