Lowe rebounds quickly from fire

Published 11:18 pm Thursday, March 10, 2011

President-elect Barbara Groner welcomes Lowe Foundation property manager Mike McCuistion to Dowagiac Rotary Club Thursday. (The Daily News/John Eby)

President-elect Barbara Groner welcomes Lowe Foundation property manager Mike McCuistion to Dowagiac Rotary Club Thursday. (The Daily News/John Eby)

Had a fire not burned the Edward Lowe Foundation that frigid Sunday morning, Jan. 23, property manager Mike McCuistion might have been talking to Dowagiac Rotary Club about maintaining 2,600-acre Big Rock Valley and a zoo partnership.

Disaster recovery planning should be a priority, and Lowe’s 45 employees know that better than most after theirs was thoroughly tested.

“Fortunately,” McCuistion said Thursday noon at Elks Lodge 889, “we did have a disaster recovery plan in place. We’ve had procedures in place for over 20 years.”

McCuistion said his organization developed different scenarios for disasters which realistically might disrupt the organization, such as fire, floods and tornadoes to the loss of several key employees simultaneously in an accident or a medical emergency, such as a chemical leak or even an evacuation forced by Cook nuclear plant and prevailing winds.

Once the written plan is developed, “It’s critical to keep some copies not in your usual business area, but off-site,” like one he kept on his nightstand.

“It’s important to get input from others in your organization and to share the plan with others involved in implementing it,” McCuistion said. “It’s important to update the plan and to review it. An important part of disaster recovery planning is to review insurance, to know your limits and, probably more important, to know your exclusions. Another key thing is if your coverage is for replacement cost or actual cash value, which can be dramatically different.

“Our insurance is all set up by what we call statement of values. Each facility we have is listed specifically, which we have to update annually. It’s important to take regular photos and videos of your facilities and contents and keep multiple copies on and off site. Back-up computer systems. Everybody knows that’s critical, but invariably a system will crash. A big thing we see is laptops. A lot of people save things to the desktop and never back them up. With smart phones, you hear of people losing their SIM cards with all of their contact information. It’s pretty easy to back that up to a laptop.

“Most importantly, make disaster recovery planning a priority at some level. Obviously, if you’re doing production things, it’s not going to be your highest priority.”

McCuistion recalled that the fire broke out about 7:30 a.m.

“When I pulled up, it was 4 below zero,” he said.

“We had 10 fire departments respond with over 50 firefighters,” including Dowagiac’s ladder truck, which proved “critical” for aerial spraying — and later as a vantage point for photographing the devastated interior of one of the original buildings.

It took 12 hours to extinguish the blaze which consumed 9,200 square feet and 24 offices.

A precise cause for the accidental fire could not be determined.

“We’re assuming it was electrical or furnace-related,” he said. “The firemen were able to save an adjoining wing, but the smoke damage is such that we’ll have to renovate the whole building before we can use it.”

McCuistion said the foundation established five temporary offices using guest houses.

”We did a lot of things right before the fire,” he said. “We had a good plan and communicated it well with everyone involved. We worked with the local fire department and had them out annually, so they were familiar with all of our buildings. They had been through not too long before the fire and they were also familiar with the road system so they knew right away how to set up loop systems for tankers and stuff like that. It flowed really well.”

McCuistion maintains a “red book,” which is a notebook he carries in his briefcase crammed with all manners of phone numbers and other critical information about staff, board and vendors and an insurance summary with policy numbers, limits and the agent’s cell number.

“During the fire I was able to contact people and keep things rolling,” he said. “We weren’t supposed to go into the building until several days after the fire because of the state fire marshal investigation. We had insurance policies in a fire-proof safe in the building, but we couldn’t access that, so the red book was critical. We intentionally had a working network server at a remote site, which was critical, too. We had taken videos of all of the buildings and contents and had that documentation in advance.”

“Our employees knew what to do and responded quickly,” McCuistion related. “Electricity and gas were turned off while the fire department was getting set up and we had a generator heating the building that we had to override. Our staff provided support services to the fire department. We had snow that night and they were able to plow trails around the building. We had staff come in and prepare food, lunches, for the firefighters. We called in vendors who provided coffee and cookies for the firefighters. Again, it was really cold that morning. We had to set up temporary heaters around the site so firemen could warm up. We also set up a rehab center for them to get warm and to get meals in them. The fire was put out by 8 o’clock Sunday. As part of our recovery plan we had everyone working Monday morning. We had an all-employee meeting, then everyone went to their temporary offices. They weren’t pretty offices or comfortable offices, but we were working.”

A counselor came in during the first week after the fire.

“That’s something I hadn’t anticipated,” he admitted, “was the emotional toll on people. It’s one thing if your home burns, but an office is an office. A lot of people took it hard. For several days after the fire we had morning breakfasts so we could all share what was going on and what we were doing. Communication helped the healing process. I’m a type-A personality and my supervisor said  I pushed too hard.”

Under things they could have done better, he lists the content video was five years old and should have been updated every two years.

“I underestimated the importance of the press,” McCuistion said. “We have a communication director, but I didn’t think about that when I called in everyone I thought we needed. We talked about it in our planning process, so I should have thought about it earlier in the process when we were all running around busy.”

Documents housed in old-fashioned metal file cabinets “survived very well,” he said. “They’re smoky and we have to copy everything to reuse it. Critical archives we put in freezers to preserve them for restorationists to dry. You have to learn patience. You may be in a hurry, but not everyone else is. We’re just now getting individual phone lines set up this week. We’re working with architects right now” to rebuild.

“Our goal is to have a new facility up and running in 12 months,” McCuistion said.

The foundation is a non-profit organization endowed in 1990 by Kitty Litter creator Edward Lowe.

It operates with two main missions.

“Our primary mission,” McCuistion explained, “is helping second-stage entrepreneurs who are beyond start-up. They typically have somewhere between $1 million and $100 million in sales and between 10 and 100 employees. They’re well-established and are critical because they employ a large majority of the people in the workforce.”

Services the Lowe Foundation provides to these entrepreneurs include peer-to-peer learning retreats; Companies to Watch programs in six states, including Michigan and Indiana; economic gardening resources, for communities to help existing entrepreneurs develop, grow and increase employment opportunities, as opposed to “poaching, where communities try to go out and grab a Saturn plant from another community.”

“Another program we have is a Web site, YourEconomy.org. It’s a database that tracks entrepreneurs and business activity within the United States. You can break it down to a countywide level, so if you’re involved with economic development and you want to see how many start-up businesses are in your community versus the community next door, you can look at that. It’s a great tool for economic development activity.”

Secondarily, the Lowe Foundation’s mission is the perpetual management of the property in Penn Township in central Cass County using good environmental and stewardship techniques.

“That’s what I was originally going to talk to you about,” said McCuistion, whose appearance was arranged by former Rotarian and Southwestern Michigan College trustee Dan Wyant, a former state agriculture director who left his position as Lowe president and chief operating officer to become Gov. Rick Snyder’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) director and Quality of Life group executive.

“We have a five-year partnership right now with 15 Midwestern zoos, including Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago,” he said.