Having a “very tight-knit management team in place” and
“folks who work for our company who really care about our place of business”—that certainly made a difference the night that crisis played out. And something else helped, too. Reed calls it “pure dumb luck.” Several years ago, heightened terrorist alerts and a Florida hurricane prompted Gaylord to work with a consulting company on a comprehensive crisis-communica- tion plan and training for itsmanagement team. In other words, that night in early May, the Gaylord Opryland was as pre- pared for disaster as it could be.
WeatherWarnings The predictions—for a high, unprecedented amount of rain- fall for Nashville—started onWednesday, April 28. “And then it started to rain on Saturday morning,” Reed recalled during an interview in late October, just a few weeks before the Nov. 15 reopening of the Gaylord Opryland Resort&Convention Center. “And it rained all day Saturday and Sun- day, and by the time it stopped on Sunday evening, we had had 14 inches of rain. To put that in per- spective, the highest 24-hour rain- fall prior to that was eight inches, and we’d received 14 inches.” On Sunday morning, local flood-
ing began to occur in and around Nashville — and Gaylord’s crisis- communication plan kicked into gear. “We started to receive e-mails from the head of security of our company,” Reed said. “The first e-mail I got was at about 10 on Sundaymorning, say- ing that the NationalWeather Serv- ice [NWS] was predicting that with the rain that we’d had to date and the expected rain that we were going to get through the rest of the afternoon, they anticipated that the Cumberland River would peak at about three feet below the top of our levee.” That e-mail was followed by
another one three hours later. This time, the head of security, working with the NWS, relayed that the crest had been elevated by about a foot and would peak early on Monday morn- ing—just two feet below the top of Gaylord’s levee.With updates com- ing throughout Sunday afternoon, Reed scheduled a conference call for 5 p.m. On the call with him were Gaylord Opryland General Manager PeteWeien and othermembers of the hotel’s management team, Gaylord President and COO David Kloeppel (who was stuck at an airport in Florida), Gaylord’s general counsel, and BennettWestbrook, senior vice
president of development, design, and construction, who had overseen the improvements that Gaylord had made to the levee five years earlier. Weien recommended that they assemble the Gaylord Opry-
land’s guests in one of the hotel’s ballrooms, for safety rea- sons. Reed agreed. Then, he said, he “went on this little bit of a lecture about how everyone in New Orleans felt that they were safe the day after Katrina — and then those levees broke.” He said toWestbrook: “I think we should try tomake sure that the integrity of those levees is there and that there’s no issue whatsoever.”Westbrook agreed to take the hotel’s head of propertymanagement,Director of EngineeringMonty Allsbrooks, with him to walk the levee and ensure there was no seepage, and to report back to the team on a 7 p.m. con- ference call.