Flooding dampens construction season

Vermont Business Magazine, Sep 01, 1998

From last winter's ice storms to this summer's flooding, Vermont has experienced many acts of God, or at the very least, rampages of Mother Nature.

Frequently, these events have been an emotional and financial disaster for some farmers, families, towns and cities. But there is at least one segment of the economy which has benefited: the construction industry.

"The ice storm made tree-chippers smile," said David Coburn, the Department of Housing and Community Affairs' disaster assistance coordinator. "I expect they'll all be in Florida next summer. But as for the flooding, we're only beginning to get the first of the numbers in."

It's hard to arrive at even an approximate figure for storm damage.

For example, federal estimates after the ice storm credited it with doing about $4 million worth of damage to the sugaring industry. No state agencies kept track of the dollar cost of flooding damage to private homes.

And estimates of the summer's flooding damage to highways and bridges range anywhere from $4.6 million to $10 million, and those figures are expected to rise.

So, it is difficult to quantify how much money might have come or will come to the construction industry from the recent natural disasters.

However, certain sectors of the economy, especially emergency relief companies and road and bridge repair contractors, are focused closely on the issue.

EMERGENCY RELIEF

Business has been good this year for companies specializing in disaster relief, like GW Savage Corp of South Burlington, which is the largest professional insurance restoration contractor in the state.

"We are sorry that people had these problems, but if you look at it from a dollars and cents perspective, we had a very good year," said general manager Bruce Wheeler "With the ice storm and then the flooding, we've been in the middle of this thing since January."

During the ice storm, some individuals went up and down the roads of hard-hit communities selling generators out of the backs of their pickup trucks; profiteering was not entirely unknown. Yet professional disaster relief companies don't raise their prices when disaster hits, and they are trained to use psychology and compassion as well as construction know-how in dealing with people who are experiencing the effects of disaster, said William Savage, president and owner of GW Savage Corp.

"It's very necessary for a company to be equipped brainwise, to deal with people who need help in disasters," Savage said. "Yes, the ultimate end is you end up making money. But you've got to have some compassion.

"They've got six feet of water in their basement, or a tree chopped their house in half. They're in major disarray, and then you show up and start talking about fixing their house."

After the ice storm started, Savage received over 190 emergency calls within 96 hours, Wheeler said. The storm started on a Friday, and by Saturday, when the company started to deal with the situation, it found it's own office had lost electrical power. However, the telephones were working, and hooked up to generators, the company found it could receive calls from insurance agencies and people in trouble.

"We established a triage system," Wheeler said. "We put out our trucks with two-men teams, a generator and chain saws, and we used phones and pagers to coordinate where they were and where they were going. We kept track of whether we had a person who had a tree literally on their roof as opposed to a person who had a leak in the eaves. Men with tarps would crawl on the roof and nail them down, then go on to the next situation, and then go back later and accomplish permanent repairs. We had to do it that way to prevent as much damage as possible. And we went all out that way, 24 hours a day for 10 days, to put a Band-Aid on these emergency situations."

It was quite an adventure, and "we got some nice thanks-yous from the people involved," Wheeler said. "It was quite satisfying that way. "

In the summer, the flooding situation was so bad that major insurance companies were reassigning claims adjusters to Vermont from as far away as Virginia, Wheeler said.

"They were here on temporary for two, three and four weeks, giving estimates and checks so people could repair their damage," Wheeler said.

"One thing I wish more people knew is that flood insurance is cheap. They should call their insurance agents and find out about it. A lot of people had to pay for the pumping out personally, because it wasn't covered under the normal homeowners policy."

One of the most satisfying experiences Savage Corp had during the severe flooding this summer, disaster made no contribution to its bottom line, Wheeler said.

"We were kind of flattered and very happy to receive a call from the South Burlington Fire Department," he said. "They needed pumps off Shelburne Road, at a housing development on Bartlett's Bay Road. The water was running like a river. We rented large pumps and sump pumps to add to what we had in inventory and we went down to help the fire department. We didn't charge. That was our way of paying back to the community. Honest too God, we got a couple of jobs out of it, but that was not our primary goal."