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Environmental Hazards

Environmental Hazards

To hear the town folks tell it, the screech of ambulance sirens seemed ever constant, lasting all morning, into the night and even into the afternoon of the following day.

With each wail of every ambulance that sped past the Spencer Country Inn on the way to a hospital in town or miles away, banquet manager Louise Moore knew that another neighbor of hers in Spencer, Mass., was in bad shape with either intense gastro-abdominal pain or serious skin burns.

Located 51 miles west of Boston in central Massachusetts and home to 11,600 people, Spencer made headlines in late April when a malfunction at the town’s water filtration plant pumped gallons of lye into the water system. Also known as sodium hydroxide—a potentially fatal soda-solid commonly used to reduce acidity, fight pipe corrosion and clear drain pipes—the lye sickened or burned more than a hundred people, two critically, forcing local and state health officials to order the closing of all restaurants and other business that used public water for three days.

Moore said that the Spencer Country Inn, actually about two miles outside of town even though it has a Main Street address, was one of three restaurants in the area that were lucky. They have their own well water, unconnected to the town’s supply, and remained open.

While the actions Spencer officials took to contain and remove the poison from the water system are rare in the United States, environmental hazards that turn into disasters—prompted by man or nature—have been a scourge of the restaurant and hospitality industries for a long time.

And, according to many, they are going to become more frequent and more costly.

Like a fire that damages a restaurant, an environmental hazard, be it the unpredictable mistakes of man or his scheming or the mysterious forces of nature, can seriously hurt, if not kill, a business.

Just last fall, about 50 miles of private and public beachfront from Chekka to Damour in Lebanon—portions of which are reported to be the most pristine beaches in the Middle East and a natural habitat for some of the world’s rarest birds, turtles and fish—were marred when 10,000 gallons of globular black crude poured from bomb-damaged oil tanks into the Lebanese Sea.

Called an “eco-nightmare” by Lebanon’s government, which continues to clean up six months later, portions of the beach remain closed, still hindering sales at the numerous hotels, resorts and restaurants that call the area home.

Nature can be just as brutal and even harder to predict, such as when a tornado earlier this month devastated Greensburg, Kan., a town of 1,500, killing nine people and destroying residences and businesses throughout town, including three restaurants, one of which was a Pizza Hut.

Beyond the physical damage to property or the loss of business from inaccessible roads, operators note that there are less obvious costs associated with winning back guests once the hazard has passed or reconstruction is completed in addition to haggling with insurers and government sources over what they will and will not cover.

The Spencer water contamination incident was an accidental, manmade environmental mishap that operators say they paid for in lost business and discarded inventory with little to no help from insurers, who didn’t want to hear about business interruption coverage.

“I probably lost about $6,000 in sales during the two days the city kept us closed,” says Bob Gannon, owner of the Trumball Bar & Grill, a 70-seat, pub-style restaurant in Spencer that enjoys its strongest sales over the weekend, when officials closed local businesses.

Gannon, who also lost an undetermined amount of food inventories that had been prepared with contaminated water, said so far neither city officials nor his insurers are discussing ways to compensate him or his peers for their losses.

“I don’t think they are going to do anything,” he says. “I don’t even hear anyone talking about it.”

Some manmade environmental hazards can foist as much financial pain as Mother Nature, and often they are not accidental, but are carefully planned, such as when highway construction and transportation projects change traffic patterns or neighborhood densities.

As aging cities like Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, San Francisco and Newark, N.J., frantically mount multibillion-dollar improvement plans to salvage decrepit bridges and subway lines, widen highways, or build new traffic hubs and mixed-used complexes, scores of restaurants nationwide face possible extinction—or at least the permanent loss of customers driven away by the temporary chaos.

One of them is JRG Restaurant Bar and Fashion Café, a popular, Caribbean-theme supper club that plays to black urban professionals near downtown Brooklyn, N.Y.

JRG is slated to become a victim of eminent domain as the city and Forest City Ratner Cos., a real estate developer, begin razing buildings to make way for a $2.5 billion mixed-use development featuring condominiums, entertainment, office space, retail and a home arena for the National Basketball Association’s Nets, collectively known as Atlantic Yards at Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush.

Owners of JRG did not return phone calls, but a general manager told the Daily News that “something good is going to come out of this,” referring to the likelihood that the establishment will get a settlement to relocate elsewhere.

The looming threat of global warming has no such silver lining. With wide scientific consensus that global warming will unleash destructive weather patterns the likes of which have never been seen, many crisis management consultants are urging operators to put in place policies that can help them recover from any such events more quickly.

Marx Layne, a foodservice marketing and brand-image consultant and crisis management expert in Farmington Hills, Mich., says operators should prepare now for inevitable and potentially catastrophic incidents. He increasingly urges clients to see crisis management, emergency or disaster planning, and marketing as the same discipline.

“The best thing a restaurateur can do in light of an act of God or manmade environmental hazard is to do what they should be doing in good times: Know who your customer is and how to reach them,” he says. “Whether you are a McDonald’s or a four-star restaurant, people love to feel special, all the more so if you communicate with them right after the crisis hits. But the key is to know who and where they are now.”

Layne says his strategy is founded on the idea that following any disaster people want to return to normalcy as quickly as possible. And although in some instances life may never be the same again, they want the comfort of their favorite restaurants.

But global warming could present environmental hazards for which the restaurant industry has no adequate recovery plan. As the earth gets warmer, many environmentalists and climatologists predict that hurricanes, tsunamis, coastal flooding, desertification through deforestation, huge human population shifts in geography, declining fresh water supplies, hotter summers, warmer winters, and species extinction—especially in the seas—will reach intensities never before seen in recorded history.

The recent 17th annual Global Warming Conference in Miami outraged the Bush Administration in its conclusion that while it is true the earth has been warming since the end of the last Ice Age, it is also true that man is accelerating the warming with his dependence on fossil fuels and other carbon-byproduct emitters of modern life.

What’s more, the scientists wrote in a consensus document, the horrific storms of 2004 and 2005—including the tsunami in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia that killed 230,000 people and hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which obliterated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast—are not unrelated freaks of nature, but are born of the same parent: global climate change. The scientists concluded that the storms should be seen as a prelude.

Leah Chase, the 81-year-old chef-owner of the 65-year-old Dooky Chase restaurant in New Orleans, knows all too well how destructive such events can be.

Nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina demolished New Orleans’ levy system and forced the evacuation of the city’s civilians for six months, Chase is still struggling to reopen her famous Creole restaurant.

While she has been aided by some of her insurers, generous industry support and government assistance to replace fixtures, furniture and kitchen equipment destroyed by high water, Chase reports that contractors are too busy in other parts of the city to stay committed to her recovery efforts.

Expecting that she would have reopened by October 2006, Chase said she is now setting her sights on early summer.

“A plumber may come in and connect this pipe or replace that pipe over two or three days, but they get called away to other parts of the city,” she says, sighing. “The plumbers, the electricians, the guys who do the sheetrock and what not, they are all overworked and overbooked, you might say.

WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS…

Make sure all business records are backed-up, copied and stored off-site, ideally digitally. This includes insurance contacts, customer databases, banking accounts, vendor lists, accounts payable and receivable, and a current blueprint of the restaurant.

Make sure management has home phone numbers or cell phone numbers for all staff members.

Practice emergency evacuation procedures and have a preplanned meeting spot that all staffers can easily reach. When practicing an evacuation or in a real event, be sure to shut off all power sources, especially the water lines to prevent contamination.

Have emergency phone numbers in easy reach, including phone numbers and cell numbers to regional offices for chains or the owner’s home or cell for independents.

Review insurance policies each year to ensure familiarity with activation clauses for business interruption coverage and details about deductibles.

Make sure every staffer knows where the nearest hospital is located.

Keep battery-powered radios and flashlights on-site and change the batteries every year.

Have on hand a professionally prepared risk management assessment of the property.

“They just can’t stick with you all the time. But I think we’ll get there by June.”

Even if she reopens anytime soon, Chase says she is most disturbed by the continued absence of her core clientele, the approximately 2,500 working-class neighbors who lived in the 75 buildings that make up the 26-acre Lafitte Project. The residents remain largely out of town even now. Meanwhile, the federal and local governments have vowed to raze the projects, declaring that the complex is beyond rehabilitation from Katrina’s wrath.

“They may not have been great dine-in guests,” she says. “But they were very good takeout customers, and now they are all gone,” dispersed to other cities.

Chase says she is heartened that much of the dilapidated housing project is being razed and construction has already begun on a replacement community that will feature bigger apartments for modest rents and outdoor living space with parks and backyards, in some cases.

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MAKING LEMONADE

Asked why she didn’t just relocate the restaurant to another part of town after the money began to come in to help her rebuild, especially given that her customer base is no longer there, she replies: “I saw no reason to do that—run away from the community that you helped build and can help build again. That’s not who I am. That’s not what this neighborhood is about. God willing, that’s not what this city is about.”

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