NEW ORLEANS–Three busloads of insurance claims professionals are due to get a firsthand look tomorrow at how Hurricane Katrina piled up a record for insured claims losses.
The tour through the miles of destruction left behind in New Orleans by the monster storm is being conducted by an industry member who suffered firsthand from its effects.
Thomas Brown, the president of E-Claim.com, who lives and works across the Mississippi River from the Crescent City in Gretna, La., saw the roof torn from his office and his home inundated by rains when the wind blew off his chimney.
He decided to give the tour to persons attending the ACE claims conference here, he said, because he wanted to show the extent of "Louisiana's natural disaster coupled with a manmade disaster."
"The flooding [from poorly built levees] shouldn't have happened," he said.
Explaining the view riders on the tour will get, Mr. Brown said that "a lot of what you see is the same thing," but it helps to get across an understanding of "what a massive area it is." State officials say an area seven times the size of Manhattan was destroyed.
At night the impacted area is in total darkness for miles. "It's eerie," he said.
He plans to begin the tour by routing the buses by the Superdome–not to display the arena, where work on the roof continues, but to show nearby hotels and office buildings where the wind channel from Katrina ripped out all the windows.
The cavalcade will then head north to the Lakeview area of upper-income and middleclass homes that were left severely impacted.
"Miles and miles of desolation, and it's all from flooding," said Mr. Brown, who will conduct the group north to the 17th Street levee breach where the force of the waters "was enough to turn houses upside down. It's pretty much as it was after the storm."
Mr. Brown intends to tell his own tale of success and trauma as part of the tour. Because his business is a virtual Internet claims service system for insurers–it matches them with adjusters and coordinates the work based on location and other factors–he was able to keep going even as he fled the storm.
Servers and other systems equipment for his business are in Maryland, so there was no impact on that side of operations.
"As we were evacuating, I was riding down the road using the wireless card on my computer to give demos. Clients continued to do business with me through my cell phone, but I lost all my furnishings," Mr. Brown related.
Because he had no postal service to deliver checks for months, he asked all his clients to pay by credit card–but that posed another problem. The credit card company was suspicious of the sudden surge in income and was holding up payments and demanded to see three years of his tax records.
He explained that he had been wiped out, telling them, "You don't understand, we've had a disaster here." Finally, after he dug out some waterlogged and mold-covered documents and sent a digital photo, they paid.
Mr. Brown believes many more people need to get the picture, which is why he arranged the tour. "It meant a lot that ACE came here," he said, noting that some people complained when the conference venue was picked, "Why don't you send us to Hiroshima?"
"I think this tour will help," he said. The devastation, Mr. Brown pointed out, focused the attention of talented people in the area. And for New Orleans that means "ultimately, I think, it will be rebuilt better and smarter."
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