For Wood Digest's 2006 August issue, Ron Migedt was asked to write an article about the experience of Riverside's 2004 disaster recovery. Previously Ron had spoke on this topic at the ASA Grinding Into The Future Conference. The slides from that presentation are still available here. In August of 2004 Riverside Tool Corp burnt to the ground. Through the recovery Ron learned a great deal for companies to utilize in their disaster recovery plans. As a result of the recovery process, Riverside was awarded the 2005 Blue Chip Business Award. Riverside would like to thank Wood Digest for this opportunity and cooperation in providing crucial information to business owners on the reality of disaster recovery. Below is some information that Ron could not fit into the article - but it is just as important to have. Things Your Insurance Company Won't Tell You Time Frame How long it will be until you will receive some cash? There are procedures that have to take place through insurance processes before they can relinquish funds. The one thing that you have to keep in mind is to not get upset or uptight about investigation time. In instances when it's not a natural disaster insurance companies will want to investigate what happened or at least want to investigate you personally as a business owner to ensure that there was no foul play. They have to do their job and this takes time. That's where aligning yourself with your banker is crucial to your cash flow and you will heavily depend upon them. Pursuing Coverage It is up to you to make sure that you get paid or compensated for your lost items. Especially in instances where you have a special rider for items like your business sign. You have to specify that new sign needs to be replaced using that rider, otherwise it may be taken out of the general section of your policy. You must guard your general policy against items that should be using specific riders so that you can utilize the general policy for machines or other crucial items that have no rider. Site Cleanup/Environmental Cleanup Depending on what type of disaster may occur, you will most likely be required to clear and cleanup your site. In our case we did not have any contamination to be dealt with but even then our cleanup costs totaled three times what was covered in our policy. My personal opinion is that most policies are a little low on the limits of cleanup costs. These costs would obviously increase as your facility size increases. Under Insured/Over Insured This is something that you need to ask your insurance company to give you their definition of what they consider underinsured vs. overinsured. If you are undersinsured, you can be penalized and charged for how much you were undersinsured not to mention the fact that you won't have enough insurance to aid in your recovery. On the flip side of that you do not want to have too much insurance. In addition to arousing suspicion, some insurance companies many penalize your for carrying too much insurance. This is definitely something to discuss with your insurance agent. Pictures from Riverside August 2004 As we have time to develop more material for this section of our website this page will be updated. If you have any questions that the article or this page didn't answer, feel free to contact me. Ron Migedt President/CEO Riverside Tool Corp Ron at RiversideTool.com