MANAGING A DISASTER

President of AMA Recycling, had just returned from the ARA 2013 Annual Convention in Phoenix. “I left the ARA Convention a day early and had just arrived back home the evening before it happened,” said Weaver. “The fire started at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday when someone threw some type flammable liquid on a bay door in a part of our parking lot that is not fenced in. The fire department was on the scene within ten minutes or so – fortunately for us or the damage would have been much greater.” The fire burned down one wall of the warehouse, but was put out within 15 to 20 feet of their main busi- ness office. Weaver says there was smoke damage, loss of power, and a major mess to clean up; including installing a new roof, insulation, and some cleaning of some tools and equipment that were affected. Despite this, they opened for business the same day. “Fortunately the fire did not really reach anything that would affect our busi- ness that much,” said Weaver. “When I arrived at the scene, there was a lot of smoke and water damage and we had no power. I fully planned to close the business that day but around 8:15 a.m. or so a customer dealing scrap pulled up. I explained the situation and we ended up sending him to the Pilot Truck Stop two miles down the road to use their

scales, and then come back with the ticket because we didn’t have power to operate ours.

“Both our customers and the people at Pilot Truck Stop were understanding and we worked together to get scrap weighed until we had enough generators going to use our own scales which was a few hours later.” Perhaps the most recent fire among ARA members occurred on November 3, 2014 at Cunningham Brothers in Virginia. The fire started at 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning (the cause still not determined) so fortunately they weren’t open for business and no one was hurt. However, Cunningham Brothers lost their main location that housed engine warehousing, processing, quality control, shipping, and loading docks.

“It was a devastating blow to our business because 85% of total production capacity on full service cars was done at the main yard and lost in the fire,” said Benny Cunningham, Vice President.

48 Automotive Recycling | July-August 2015

Prior to fire: Proper Insurance: No Building Insurance: No Tools Insurance: No Loss of business Insurance: No

Quick Look at Snyder’s Certified Auto and Truck Parts

After the fire: Proper Insurance: Yes, but we did not get insurance ini-

tially. A few years later we did and we have had it since then. Building Insurance: Yes Tools Insurance: Yes Loss of business Insurance: Yes What is the one main lesson you learned? NO TORCHES

Picking up the Pieces

While AMA Recycling felt the most minimal impact, all the facilities suffered loss and felt the impact in dif- ferent ways based on their location and business. For Wilbert’s, it majorly disrupted their daily opera- tions. Rick Wilbert says that while they’ve completely rebuilt and been adequately compensated for the fire, it still impacts them today.

“Although we have a new facility and operations are going well, I think that we lost a lot of momentum in the start of the rebuilding process,” said Wilbert. “It took us ninety days to set up a temporary trailer where we could take some retail. We had nowhere to process vehicles for the U-Pull-It, so our operations kind of came to a stop. We ended up trying to process cars here and there. Fortunately, we had two other full-ser- vice yards so we could deploy our employees to those sites and continue to pay their salaries. “I think that our sales are way behind where they would have been had we not had the fire.” Bob Wilbert, Senior Project Manager, Wilbert’s Inc., came on board to help after the fire and became the point person for dealing with the insurance and the public adjustor. The day after the fires they had a meet- ing with around 12 authorities that were involved with the fire investigation and they realized very quickly that this process was bigger than they wanted to take on alone. He worked with Adjustors International to make the appropriate insurance claims. “It was a huge expense to re-open and given the size of the loss, our case got bumped up in its urgency level,” said Wilbert. To add to the stress, “The first check didn’t come in for about six months and the insurance policy was about 90 two-sided pages so we really did need to know what was covered. We created a painstaking list of items for each room – such as wire nuts, washers, wall and light fixtures, concrete, paint – anything and everything that would help the adjustors to accurately estimate the cost of rebuilding.” For Cunningham Brothers, they are still in the process of rebuilding and the fire caused a major blow to their daily operations. Cunningham says that they had to split their processing over to the dedicated cores building and it took 30 days to get that ready.

Shannon Nordstrom