By: Reneé Claire
In August of 2017 a small rainstorm put much of New Orleans under water in an afternoon summertime heavy rain. People got stranded in their cars. Homes and businesses were suddenly flooded. It was shocking. My business was one of those that flooded. It poured up from cracks in the concrete and under external walls. I stood in ankle deep water covering my 1,500 square feet coffeeshop in tears. My landlord knocked on the window, because I had barricaded the front door with sandbags before I realized it was coming in through the back as well as the under the front door. He finally coaxed me out of the building.
As I walked outside a news crew arrived and starting filming. Within minutes I was on the evening news talking about climate change and the needs of our poorly managed city to engage in mitigation strategies and infrastructure projects. If the city was committed to keeping small business in the city, than city and state leaders needed to take climate change seriously. And then I went to the bar and got very drunk.
Business owners around New Orleans felt as scared and devastated as I did that evening. But we all got back to work the next day, cleaning up and hoping for the best. While others sustained a lot of damage, my shop didn’t. I was back open two days later with a dozen fans and a huge dehumidifier on full blast. No equipment was damaged and thankfully our floors are concrete. We have flood three more times. Each time is shocking and unpredictable and none of those times were from a large storm we saw coming.
Climate change is now and it’s impacting our businesses. On the gulf coast we are seeing small storms that pop up with no warning and either move very slowly or dump a lot of rain in a short period of time. In Louisiana we have seen the same amount of rainfall for the past three years but in shorter amounts of time.
Since that very first flood in 2017, my staff and I have created a few strategies to make sure we can clean up, prevent damage, and get back open as quickly as possible. We also now understand that this is our new normal. Flooding will keep happening and we must figure out how to stay open while the shop floods. You can google photos of Venice, Italy to understand how real this story is to business owners around the globe.
My four strategies for dealing with climate change as a business owner:
Keeping your office or shop ready, good insurance, and cash reserves.
Keeping your business ready. Unfortunately, it took us being flooded twice before we really understood what to do. We don’t have any paper or cardboard within 1 foot off the ground. Anything that touches that ground is plastic or inside/on top of a big floatable plastic tub. For instance, our t-shirts are inside old 5 gallon sugar buckets. The bucket provides waterproof storage but also lifts other items off the ground. We stack old rubber matts to make the ground inside our storage area higher and it also allows water to move in and out under contents.
We have a checklist of what to do when it starts flooding and how to clean up. The list includes when to put the sandbags against the door - we have a marking on the sidewalk & when the flooding hits that mark, everyone knows to move the sandbags in place. We learned that once the water gets to a certain point, we just don’t have enough time to put out all the sandbags. While it isn’t the prettiest aesthetic, sandbags stay next to the front door and never move from our back door. The threat of flooding is just too great. In our second flooding, it took us 45 minutes to put all the sandbags out from storage.
We know our building. Our floors aren’t flat, so some parts of the shop floods and some parts don’t. We move tables and chairs to the parts that don’t flood. Whoever is working that day also emails me a videos so I can immediately forward it to the insurance company in case we have a claim. We also have a hurricane kit. We have plastic tarps to protect the big equipment and instructions on how to stack furniture to protect the most expensive items in the shop and how to protect everything in case the giant tree outside falls into our huge windows.
Good Insurance. Please consult your insurance agent for specifics. I obviously carry a Flood policy. I also carry a General Liability, Property, and Workmans Comp policies.
Each policy does something different even if they cover the same physical things. Remember damage to property is covered by HOW it is damaged. Water that comes in through the window and damages tables is not covered with the same policy as water that comes up from the floor and damages the same table. It is also important to make sure you have coverage for replacement value, not purchased values. A lot of the furniture in my shop originally came from my home or from thrift shopping over the years. But if a hurricane wiped out my entire shop, I’d have to buy everything again to open as quickly as possible. That would cost significantly more than I had originally obtained everything. Add up your policies and make sure you can completely reopen your business from the value of your coverage. Otherwise you are underinsured.
Cash Reserves. For the hospitality industry, we are use to seasonal cash flow and make allowances during particular times of year for saving as much cash as possible. Here in New Orleans, we are able to save the most amount of money in the Spring and then hope it lasts until late Fall. But throw in climate change and the reality is we need to change what and how we are saving. In each flooding we have been able to spend less in clean up, but we lose money in payroll to prep and clean, lost sales for having to close and customers who just don’t visit us when it rains because they are scared to lose their car. This is due to how not knowing where the flooding is happening around the city once it starts raining.
While insurance can cover big losses, it’s often not worth making a claim on a bathroom door that can be replaced with a better one that won’t warp easily. Also insurance takes a long time to come in unless there is a total loss like a massive hurricane and your agent is writing checks to get you into a hotel and some food. In the meantime you need access to cash or credit. That can come in the form of cash savings, line of credit, short or long term debt.
Personally I don’t want to take out a large loan to ensure I have extra cash on hand and I don’t want to load up on a credit card, but I do have a pretty sizeable line of credit for when cash flow becomes difficult. But this situation becomes even more dire during Hurricane Season or in our changing climate, during times when storms seems to be worse. Unfortunately climate change is erratic and we don’t really understand it yet and that makes access to cash even more important.
I think how we deal with climate change is an increasingly important business issue that is not being discussed with enough urgency. I’m going to write a series of articles on this topic. Shoot me an email or connect with me via Insta if you have specific questions you’d like me to tackle.
