Kevin Regan's advice for risk managers preparing for a hurricane is twofold--don't take anything for granted when it comes to a city's infrastructure, and take good care of your employees if you expect to be up and running again anytime soon.

Mr. Regan, regional vice president of operations in the Southeastern United States and Caribbean for Starwood Hotels, speaks from experience. He helped set up the hotel chain's preparedness plan and saw it tested last year during Hurricane Katrina. Starwood operates several Sheraton and W hotels in and around New Orleans.

Now Mr. Regan is involved with post-Hurricane Katrina revisions to the plan.

"Our one issue that we didn't anticipate was the total devastation of the city's infrastructure," Mr. Regan said in a recent Marsh Internet seminar, "Preparing for the 2006 Hurricane Season."

As has been well documented, the city was without power and water for days in some areas, and weeks in others. Some areas are still not operational.

"The city went out of control," he said. "At that point, we had to take things into our own hands."

Mr. Regan described a chaotic situation when the police precinct captain reported that "the city was out of control--that the thugs had broken into the armory and had better weapons than the police did, and the police force was abandoning their positions everywhere."

After that, he noted, "we saw looting. We saw fires started. Anything you can imagine, we had to deal with."

Before the storm, he said, the three major hotels in New Orleans began preparations according to plan. At the Sheraton, for example, this "ensured we had enough food and water for 1,000 guests through the predicted storm period and several days beyond."

Because of the storm's changing path, when the order came to evacuate the hotels in New Orleans, it was too late. "The airlines started pulling out. The bus services were nonexistent. The infrastructure of the city was falling apart. So, we were left to pretty much fend for ourselves," he said. The hotel's customers and its communications systems were moved up several floors to avoid flooding.

"The storm came through on Monday at 6:10 a.m., and we were fortunate we didn't take the brunt of the storm," Mr. Regan recalled. "The Northeast quadrant of the storm hit Mobile and the panhandle of Florida. For us the fortunate part was that we didn't get major damage."

Although the hotel had some flooding and guest rooms were without power, "our biggest issue was the flooding in the city of New Orleans, and the lack of infrastructure in the government of the city," he reiterated.

"We had no plumbing. All the sewer lines were backed up. All the water was coming up the street," he said. "That created a concern for health. It created the concern for potable water."

Generators, dehumidifiers and other equipment on standby in California and Arizona were trucked in, he said. This meant that "we were the first hotels downtown with power, with trucked-in water and with air conditioning, and we were the first hotels to get our restaurants and our guest rooms back in service."

This was possible, he said, "because we had a plan--also because we had leadership, coordinated teamwork and because we communicated."

"Our team in New Orleans had full authority to do whatever they needed to do--order equipment, services, deal with each need, which we did by getting generators, construction, security, cleanup crews and more," he continued.

One decision the company made early on was to provide free housing for employees. This decision was made at the corporate level, he noted, making it easier to get checks and any necessary information out to employees after the hurricane.

As part of its procedures, Starwood had a comprehensive plan for tracking and keeping in touch with employees after the storm, doing online searches of all its hotels, working with its human resource departments. There also were hot-line numbers employees could call.

"I think out of 1,000 [employees], there were two or three we could not account for, which we found a month to two months later," he said.

The company turned an empty hotel in Dallas into employee housing, he said. Employees from the New Orleans properties were then moved to Dallas, and from there they were moved to Starwood properties in Birmingham, Ala., Atlanta and Orlando, he noted.

The company then arranged for a realtor in each city to help locate housing for all employees.

In the interim, he said, all employees had online access, meaning they could retrieve information about their benefits. "If they needed money, we got that to them. If they needed medical [support], we got that to them. If they needed to register for FEMA or Red Cross [grants], we set that up for each individual," Mr. Regan said. "We put them up for free in our hotels through February."

Mr. Regan credited their successful planning to experience, "but it's unfortunate that we in the United States had a lot of experience prior to Hurricane Katrina," he said, noting that the company had also faced Hurricanes Bonnie, Charles, Frances and Ivan. "We were still recovering from those when we were hit by Dennis and Emily and then Katrina. Each of the storms was different, but none like Katrina."

At the core of the company's plans "are the mandates that we do the right thing and that we ensure the safety of our guests and associates," Mr. Regan emphasized.

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