When companies prepare their continuity plan, they try to come up with every possible contingency. However, it’s doubtful anyone could anticipate 50 people, six dogs, 14 puppies and a pig living in their office.
That’s exactly what happened to Punctual Abstract, after Hurricane Ida walloped New Orleans and surrounding areas. Although some employees lost their homes to the storm, the company never ceased operations.
CEO Ted Woloszyk said the area had about five days’ warning about the hurricane, so the team began making plans on Wednesday for its main office, located in Harvey, La., in the West Bank, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Ida hit on Sunday, Aug. 29.
In reality, preparations started in 2005, Woloszyk told The Title Report, after Hurricane Katrina, which also made landfall on Aug. 29. He joined the company nearly three years ago.
“Punctual Abstract was in place 16 years ago, so we learned what it takes to get through a hurricane,” he said.
A lot of things have changed since then to make uninterrupted operation of the business more feasible, he said.
“We have new technology and services, so it was easier to accomplish this time versus Katrina, and plus we were better prepared because we learned a lot of things we didn’t know before,” Woloszyk said.
For example, the office has a commercial propane generator on site, so the facility retained power when the electricity went out around noon Sunday.
“Most people have their generators backed to the natural gas lines, but the wind knocked down so many trees that the community’s natural gas was shut off,” he said. “We knew that was going to be a possibility because of the wind damage during Katrina, so we have a 1,000-gallon propane tank on the premises.”
The office also maintained access to the internet when the community’s main internet provider went down because Punctual Abstract has multiple sources of service, including a fiber-optic line, the cable company’s line, and an old copper line.
A major part of the company’s continuity plan involved having as much of its information and operational data backed up on the cloud as it could.
“One of the big things we started with three years ago was getting everything online,” Woloszyk said. “In the event this building disappeared, or we had no access to this building, our teams could be operational, we wouldn’t lose any data and we could continue to run the company with limited impact.”
Chief Technology Officer Nick Sagona led that effort. Sagona joined the company in 2016, when Punctual Abstract was growing, widening its national footprint. The migration of the company’s data from hardware housed in New Orleans began soon after that.
“We have a very minimal IT infrastructure now here, at our office,” he said. “All of our systems are at AWS (Amazon Web Services) and redundancies are in a secure data center location, landlocked in Dallas.”
Punctual Abstract also moved team members from desktop computers to laptops and gave key team members hotspots for internet access if wireless service is interrupted.
“At a moment’s notice, our business continuity plan can be flipped on,” Sagona said, citing the pandemic as a perfect example.
“COVID hit and we had people take their laptops and work from home,” he said. “A hurricane hits, and we can do the same thing. By and large, the business keeps humming, people get to safe places and they start working from whatever hotel or friend’s house they are staying at, and we don’t miss a beat.”
Employees literally live in the office
Although the office fared well during the worst of Ida, the same could not be said for team members’ homes, as 50 of the company’s 85 Louisiana employees had their homes damaged or had to evacuate. Four team members saw their homes destroyed.
Unfortunately, initial weather models predicted Ida would make landfall west of New Orleans, so many decided to stay rather than evacuate out of town. By the time it became clear the city would be getting a direct hit, it was too late to leave.
Punctual Abstract founder and Owner Steve Daigle invited employees and their families who were displaced to hunker down in the office. Woloszyk estimates they housed 30 people at a time, as well as six dogs, 16 puppies and a pig, for days.
Daigle opened his home in the West Bank and his ranch in Mississippi to employees and their families, too, hosting 15 people. Making sure all team members and their families were safe was the priority, Woloszyk said.
“Steve told me that the safety of everyone is primary and the business is secondary,” he said.
Woloszyk and his girlfriend had to evacuate their home Sunday morning, so he stayed at the office, too, along with their two litters of 2-week-old puppies and pet pig.
The company has a working gym on the premises, so employees had access to showers. That’s also where most people set up their cots and air mattresses, Woloszyk said.
“We used some of our workspace for sleeping space in the evenings, but we shut the gym down and used it as the place for sleeping for the majority of the people,” he said.
He credited Daigle’s deep community connections and resources with Punctual Abstract being able to feed the evacuees and keep their gas tanks full, as groceries and gasoline were in short supply in the days after Ida. Daigle grew up in the area and founded the company in 1993.
“He knows a food distributor here locally, and he was able to pick up the phone and say, ‘We need enough food to feed 50 people for five days.’ They brought us pallets of food,” Woloszyk said, visibly moved.
Daigle’s brother also cooked meals offsite and brought them to the office.
Four days after the storm, Daigle had a gas distributor bring a fuel truck to the office to fill up employees’ cars.
The second week after the hurricane, 20 people were still living in the office. By the week of Sept. 13, everyone had found a safe place to go. The four employees who lost their homes are staying with friends and family for the time being, Woloszyk said.
Continuity plan additions
Punctual Abstract’s continuity plan worked well, Woloszyk said, as the company never stopped operating. Its 90 out-of-state employees kept the business running the Monday after the storm, and by Tuesday, half of the Louisiana staff was back to work. Everyone was working in some capacity by the next week, he said.
Just like after Katrina, the company learned things from Ida. For one thing, Woloszyk said, he’s adding a washer and dryer to the premises, as well as a stockpile of non-perishable food, bottled water and toiletries, in case families need to live at the office for an extended period of time again.
The company also is reviewing its pre-hurricane evacuation procedures, to make sure key team members are placed far enough from ground zero to be able to conduct business.
“We don’t have enough local infrastructure for everyone to stay,” Woloszyk explained. “I don’t have 100 hotspots.”
Communication is a problem if everyone stays in the storm-damaged city, Sagona added.
“It was three days before we got cell phone coverage back,” he said. “If we can get our key people outside the area, they’ll have reliable communication.”
Sagona also said he’s aiming to get the office’s computer data 100 percent on the cloud (it’s about 90 percent now.)
“We want to be completely autonomous and independent of a physical structure, essentially,” he said.
Punctual Abstract is also looking into a satellite internet connection for the office.
Those who are interested in assisting the Punctual Abstract team members who lost their homes to Hurricane Ida can learn more here.