Quick Look at Nordstrom’s Automotive Prior to fire:

Proper Insurance: Yes, not under- or over-insured. “I felt

“Six months after the fire, our production was down 33% but we didn’t lose sales,” said Cunningham. “Thanks to our multiple locations, we weathered better than I can understand. It’s nothing short of a miracle that I’ve experienced. Comparing the six months before the fire and the six months after, we are only $200,000 dollars off. We made some signifi- cant changes to make that happen, and we did expe- rience a major blow and disruption to our service, but really I am in awe that we are where we are in sales.” Snyder’s impact was shorter-lived. Now with four locations, they only had one at the time of the fire. The fire destroyed their dismantling building but not their main office building or new inventory. “The fire cut down on our processing time and had some impact on our sales,” said Snyder. “The night after the fire, my brothers and father who were in the business with me sat down at the dinner table to devise a temporary plan for the business while we rebuilt. “We decided to use an active body shop that we had. In that building, we had one bay where we could process cars. We relocated all three dismantlers to that one bay. We would partially dismantle the vehicle out- side the building, then bring it inside to finish the dis-

good about our insurance before and after the fire. We in- volved the loss control agents with our plans for a new build- ing we are getting ready to build so they can give us some helpful hints on how to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” Building insurance: Yes Tools Insurance: Yes for catastrophe Loss of Business Insurance: “We had but didn’t have to

use. They were able to contain the fire to the middle of the building. That bay was handling the U-Pull-It and Grade A (high money vehicles) at the time and we just moved them to the other shops. Self-service had to temporarily relocate until we cleaned up some but it didn’t totally ruin the space so they could continue to use it.”

After the fire: Proper insurance: Yes Building insurance: Yes Tools insurance: Yes Any insurance that you didn’t have before the fire?

“We recently upped our business revenue continuation in- surance based on our annual insurance review. We consid- ered all factors such as severe weather like tornados not just fire because there are many things that can cause an inter- ruption to our business that we don’t always think about.”

mantling while we were partially dismantling the next vehicle and so on. We ran it kind of like a disassembly line, so to speak. We did this for the three months that it took to rebuild our new dismantling facility.” While it took Wilberts, Inc. about 16 months to rebuild and open to the public, Snyder’s was able to

July-August 2015 | Automotive Recycling 51