Eleven days ago — when Hurricane Irene was still over the Atlantic — Mark Atwell was assessing hail and tornado damage in Wisconsin when he got the call from his bosses in Atlanta. He would soon need to head east to discover what damage the storm was about to cause.
Atwell, his wife and their 14-year-old son packed up the RV trailer that serves as their home, office and school house most of the year, and hit the road.
Thus began the journey of one of more than 300 insurance adjusters that Atlanta-based Crawford & Co. has dispatched all along the storm track of Irene, from the Bahamas to Vermont.
Crawford is little known outside the insurance industry. But it’s the world’s largest independent provider of claims adjusters. They’re the folks who visit insurance policy holders’ homes or businesses after misfortune strikes, in order to estimate damages and determine how much of it will be covered by their insurance.
The company has about 8,700 employees scattered around the globe, including almost 900 in Atlanta.
Chances are if you’ve heard about a disaster somewhere in the world — tornado, tsunami, earthquake, hurricane, flood or oil spill — its employees arrived there within days to begin estimating damage claims for its insurance company clients.
Irene, which was a Category 1 hurricane when it hit North Carolina on Aug. 27, has been blamed for about 45 deaths. Although the storm was not as severe as initially feared, it still caused roughly $5 billion to $13 billion in damages, experts say.
But insurance companies are likely to cover only $1 billion to $5 billion of those losses, according to various estimates, because they typically don’t cover the flood damage that Irene caused in several states. That raises the specter of a substantial taxpayer-funded bailout or permanent losses for many homeowners and small businesses.
Disaster revenue
But for Crawford, Irene means much-needed business.
The company didn’t disclose how much Irene will add to its coffers, but said it won’t significantly impact sales. It gets about half of its $1 billion in annual revenue from its catastrophe response business.
Still, Crawford has itself been recovering from slumping sales and profits in recent years. The deep recession and turmoil in the financial markets in 2008 and 2009 hurt its employee pension plan and some of its other businesses, such as its Broadspire unit, which handles claims for workers’ injuries.
Crawford had steep losses in 2009 and needed to inject $50 million into its pension plan. The company also cut about 150 jobs.
Crawford’s profits have rebounded this year and hundreds of its employees have been busy with other disasters such as the hundreds of tornadoes this spring in the Midwest. But before Irene, no major hurricane had hit the United States, Crawford’s largest market, since 2008.
When the big one hits, “we have to be ready,” said Crawford CEO Jeffrey Bowman. “Fifty percent of our revenue is completely unpredictable, so we have to plan extensively.”
Expecting the worst
That planning began well before Irene was even a flick of a butterfly’s wing off the coast of Africa.
“It’s a year-around affair,” said Bud Trice, a former itinerant claim adjuster who is now Crawford’s vice president in charge of catastrophe services.
“When a hurricane comes into the country, you need a lot of people,” he said. The company has offices scattered around the globe in dozens of countries. It has a core group of full-time employees and quasi-permanent contractors like Atwell, plus thousands more that it can call when needed.
Crawford began tracking the storm that eventually became Irene as it began forming off the coast of Africa weeks ago.
As the weather system strengthened into a tropical storm and then a hurricane, dozens of insurance companies began calling Crawford, asking for adjusters to supplement their staffs or to handle the whole job.
“We were turning business away,” said Trice.
When the storm was still several days from hitting the United States, Crawford started warning adjusters that they might have a new assignment.
Then Irene hit the Bahamas. Crawford called in adjusters from its U.S., Canada and United Kingdom offices to help out there.
Meanwhile, the company also was looking for a good place to set up a temporary “induction center,” said Trice, where it could check hundreds of adjusters’ licenses and give them their assignments. The company wanted a spot close enough to the storm’s expected path to cut adjusters’ travel time, but not so close that it might get hit, too.
“Charlotte seemed to be a central point,” said Trice. But then, as Irene seemed to be headed north, the company’s leaders considered several Pennsylvania cities — Philadelphia, then Scranton, then Harrisburg, then Pittsburgh.
“The adjusters were already en route,” said Trice. Finally, they opted for Charlotte after all, since most of the adjusters were coming from Southern states. “If they’re going to New York, they’re going through Charlotte,” he said.
A family endeavor
By midweek, Atwell, 50, was driving with his family through Pennsylvania en route to a yet-to-be-assigned zone somewhere in New Jersey. They planned to spend the night at a KOA campground in Allentown.
“There’s no doubt it takes a special breed to do this,” said Atwell, whose family has spent only 2 1/2 months at their home in Tyler, Texas, in the past year. One time, they were at home only 60 hours before being sent out again.
His wife, Donna, home-schools their son, Garrett, in their traveling home so they can be together.
As they drove from Charlotte to Allentown last week, Atwell expected to get a call from Crawford within a few hours that would tell him their final destination for the next day. He also expected to receive the first 30 to 60 cases that he will handle.
That’s when the real work begins, he said. He is expected to call all those people within 24 hours and to set up appointments to examine their homes.
“I’ll work from 6 o’clock in the morning and I make myself stop at 10 o’clock at night. I’ll do that six days a week,” he said. “I’m paid on what I produce, so when there’s daylight, you’ve got to make hay.”
At each home, he starts on the roof and works his way down, noting damage, taking measurements and shooting as many as 150 pictures. Depending on the extent of the damage, it can take minutes or most of a day.
Before he leaves, he meets with the family. “They’ll pretty much know what I’m going to put on the report,” he said.
Then he writes a report to the insurance company about what he thinks happened, what needs to get fixed, and what it will cost.
“I take a lot of pictures and build a good story there,” he said. “I’ve never been subpoenaed on any files or gone to court or anything,” he said.
Atwell got into the damage estimating business seven years ago.
“It’s an exciting life,” he said, and he gets to be his own boss. “Financially, if you do this right, there’s great financial gains in it.”
Plus, he added, he’s an ordained minister and sometimes gets to bring disaster victims comfort.
By getting their insurance claim started, “you get to be a major part of their answer,” he said. “You get to tell them they’re going to be OK. That’s my way of ministering to them.”
Working the math
Back in Crawford’s Atlanta control room, Bowman looks at a wall full of large, colorful TV screens.
One shows hundreds of mint green dots along the storm track, representing each of an insurance company’s policy holders, by size of the policy. About 20 other companies are represented by other colors.
Bowman said that data can be used to estimate how much his clients will have to pay out, which they’re anxious to know.
Meanwhile, he said, his board of directors is anxiously pushing him to estimate another number: how much revenue Irene is generating for the company.
How much is it? Bowman smiled and shook his head.
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