FEATURE | Insurance
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After some of the worst flooding this country has seen in decades, followed by a prolonged cold snap,
DEREK OWENS looks
at some of the issues companies are facing when it comes to claiming for damage and how they can deal with these events in the future.
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BUSINESSPEOPLE, PARTICULARLY THOSE
serving the general public, know that the weather can have a positive or negative effect: summer weather is a well-known boom for companies relying on a consumer’s discretionary spending and general confidence, while even a few days of rain can present problems for a restaurant used to passing trade. Yet few anticipate what happened to Dennis Cotter, owner of Café Paradiso. The Cork-based vegetarian restaurant and guesthouse was affected dramatically by the flooding in the area during November last year. “The water was over three feet deep all the way through the dining room and kitchen, so everything had to go, including equipment, walls, floors and furniture, as well as a lot of the wine stock,” he recalls. Cotter’s experience wasn’t unique at a time when the elements were particularly unkind to enterprises: many businesses across the south and west of the country suffered from flooding, while the dramatic cold snap in December caused burst pipes, stock wastage and other damage in businesses across the country. In an already difficult trading environment, businesses suffering the additional blow of a big repair bill needed their insurance companies to back them up – not just to pay for the cost of damages, but to deal with claims quickly so they could get back into serving their customers. For the most part, says Conor Healy, Chief Executive of the Cork Chamber, they got the support they needed. However, Healy notes that the sheer volume of claims to insurance companies in such events posed its own problems. “The figure, in terms of flood damage, was €140-€150 million worth of claims in the Cork region. That takes a lot of
46 InBusiness May 10
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time and a lot of investment. It’s been frustrating in some cases but, in other cases, it’s been dealt with very quickly,” he says.
REBUILDING THE BUSINESS
For Café Paradiso, which suffered some €140,000 worth of damage in its flooding incident, the experience was on the positive end of the scale. “We were lucky in that we got a brilliant engineer and loss adjustor on site immediately to work with us on the claim,” says Cotter. “The insurance company were on site the day after the flood even though it was a Saturday, and things moved very quickly. The very first day, we made it clear to the insurance company that we wanted to re-open quickly. Given that this would save them money, they agreed to move through the process quickly too. We agreed a re-opening date and hired a builder even before we’d started on the details of the claim, trusting that we’d get it right somehow. It was a gamble of sorts, but it came off,” he adds.
“Of course there were problems, and we had a few scary days. At times the negotiations became surreal, moving overnight from minutely detailed analysis of turnover figures to ballpark offers. But I had never made a claim
before so I just assumed this was how it went. Also, I had total trust in the engineer and the builders so I felt a lot of comfort there,” he explains. “Ultimately too, despite the process, I believed that the insurance company were sincere in trying to resolve it quickly and fairly.
Conor Healy, Chief Executive, Cork Chamber.
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