Christopher Kane - Storm Ready: Insights on Hurricane Preparedness - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Chris Kane from Adams and Reese. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast.

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Karen Edwards: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Roofing Road Trips. I'm your guest host, Karen Edwards, and I have a really interesting topic that we're going to talk about today, and it's all about hurricane preparedness.

And we have an expert here with us today from Adams and Reese. I'd like to welcome Chris Kane. Chris, welcome. And could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you and your background?

Chris Kane: Sure thing, Karen. Well, first of all, thanks for having me and I'm excited about joining you today and your audience and more importantly is a topic that's near and dear to my heart, so I'm excited to join you guys.

My name is Chris Kane. I am a partner at Adams and Reese. I'm based out of our New Orleans office. Our firm footprint extends pretty much from the Houston market up to Washington, D.C. and everywhere in between the United States.

So we are a hurricane market, so to speak, and in fact, one of my roles here at the firm is to help head up our disaster preparedness and recovery team.

Unfortunately or fortunately, depends how you look at it, I gained firsthand experience in this area as a baby lawyer, back in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. I was a kind of run-of-the-mill young litigator, trying to chew up billable hours and do document review and those sorts of projects. And Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. A lot of the courthouses had shut down and the litigation wheel kind of slowed to a halt for a period of time, and I was blessed with an opportunity. One of our colleagues here at the time really dove in. He was an economic development lawyer and a disaster recovery infrastructure lawyer, and he helped me understand this whole field of need and kind of the importance of it. It became an opportunity at that point in my career.

But here I am, and that's kind of how I got into disaster preparedness and recovery.

Karen Edwards: Wow. You got thrown in like feet first and it was sink or swim, right?

Chris Kane: That's right.

Karen Edwards: Wow. You know, we talk so much about, obviously hurricane season runs, we're recording this at the beginning of June here and that's the official kickoff of the Atlantic hurricane season and it runs usually until about November.

And we think about preparing in terms of our homes, our families, but we don't often think about it in terms of our businesses.

So I'm really curious to hear some of your insight on maybe what are some mistakes that business owners make? What are some things that they should be thinking about as this season comes upon us? Which I have seen that NOAA has predicted an 85% chance of a more active season for 2024.

Chris Kane: Yeah, unfortunately, the forecast, and you look at the last few years, the forecasts have been fairly accurate and they've improved in forecasting both individual storms but also the hurricane season. And we are looking like we're going to be in for quite a significant season, so we're going to be on alert a lot.

And so now's the time. You know, June, usually it's still a slow part of the season, knock on wood. That seems to be the case so far. Sometimes we see things pop up early here in June. But we have time right now.

And the biggest mistake, the number one mistake that we see business owners that come to us, after the fact, that they don't have, is simply a business emergency and preparedness plan. The old saying is, if you reduce something in writing, you're more likely to achieve it and there's nothing more true than an emergency and preparedness plan.

The biggest reason for that, it's simple. When an emergency happens and something traumatic occurs or you need to jump into action, if you have a plan in place, it's going to be easy to follow versus kind of winging it and following through with not a strategic process in place.

So what does that plan look like? That's a question we get a lot. And it's really simple. It's an old "Keep it simple, stupid" model, right? It's putting in there the things that you're going to do and the action steps that you're going to take when a warning or an alert occurs that a hurricane's coming.
And this really works even true for any other emergency type of event. We saw this a lot, particularly with COVID, for example. Very similar plans were put into place.

But the number one thing is what are you going to do with your people? They need to be safe. You need to make sure you have the ability to communicate and contact them and understand where they're going and where they may be evacuating to and have a point of communication. That's the key biggest issue you see a lot in immediate disaster response, is a failure to communicate.

And a lot of businesses, particularly in our market, once their people are accounted for and everybody is safe and sound, which is the most important thing, you turn to then the business and how to get the business standing back up and what opportunities exist.

And particularly in construction, a number of other businesses within the Southeast U.S. footprint and beyond, there are opportunities. And again, if you have a written plan and know what you're going to be doing out of the gate, you can implement that plan.

So I would say the number one thing is to have a written plan. And as part of that plan, really key, is communicating with your people, both to make sure that they're okay and to then put them into action in terms of what the next steps are, post the event.

Karen Edwards: Okay, so communications, you know, hurricane hits, a bad storm comes, power goes out, cell service is limited. Could that be something as simple as having some walkie-talkies, two ways and batteries, that you equip your team with?

Chris Kane: Yeah, it could be, and you could be as low-tech or as high-tech as possible.

You know, one of our clients simply put together a... they do once a year, they update basically a text exchange, where they have all their key personnel on a singular text, so that way they're not on email and they're able to text, assuming that they have cell service or some app-based model where you can have the ability to communicate, again, assuming you have the ability to connect to cell service, so depending if you're staying put and potentially you're going to be out of power, then yeah, then a walkie-talkie or some two-way communication model would make most sense to be able to communicate with your people in a short term proximity.

But if it's going to be a longer term event and there's evacuations and people that are going to be misplaced, then you can turn to text messages or one of the many apps out there that most of our kids know how to use very, very well and we're learning how to use, but they actually come in handy when you're trying to communicate in times of emergencies.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. So I'm curious, too, because you said there's also opportunity, post-event, especially in construction, because we could have a plan to, you know, we're going to do a temporary response. We're going to get buildings dry. We're going to do tarps. Whatever that looks like. I would imagine that's something that you're going to need to have contact information available for these disaster response organizations so that you can find out where to go, who needs help and I'm available and where do I go and how do I help? Is that something that you would want in your plan?

Chris Kane: Absolutely. As part of a disaster recovery plan, and it may even be a side plan, a true business plan, but we work with clients on a regular basis. Pre-positioning is really what we call it. Pre-positioning yourself if a storm were to hit in an area to deliver your services to that area as immediately as possible.

So you mentioned, for example, I think one of the more well-known or visible programs that FEMA offers is the Blue Roof program where it's a temporary solution until the market can catch up and do permanent repairs to roofs.

Deploying those services is something that, a lot of times, is pre-positioned and agreements can be put into place with local emergency agencies and be put on either standby contracts or subcontracts with those who have disaster response contracts that are not necessarily things that you really can start jumping in to get engaged in, in the 72 hours following a storm.
That's something that really is done six months, eight months, a year, several years out, is making sure that you are in line or on the list or whatever it might be for the service that you may be able to offer in a disaster response market to be in place.

So one of the things we work with clients on, a lot of times, is listening to their business model, what services that they provide, where they see opportunities, post-disaster response and then work with them to figure out what government agency, where the funding will actually come from and try to support putting together a business plan that is well out in advance of an event occurring.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, that's smart. So I was told that you just took on the role of Chairman of the Board of Directors for Greater New Orleans Incorporated.

First of all, could tell me what is Greater New Orleans Incorporated and what is your role there going to be?

Chris Kane: Yeah, so GNO Inc., as it's referred to, it's a nonprofit organization made up of the 10 parishes. Here in Louisiana, we've got parishes, which basically are the same thing as counties. We just like to be fancy and deploy the Napoleonic code, if you will.

So our 10 parishes that immediately surround the New Orleans area make up the Greater New Orleans area. It's an organization that's focused on supporting economic development in our region, as well as working with other state partners to deliver good policies for economic development to be attractive, particularly as it relates to this topic, to the insurance property insurance market, which across our footprint, due to the number of disasters we've had, is very problematic.

And so my role as the Chairman is really just to help marshal an incredible Board of Directors and our CEO, Michael Hecht, through a host of economic development projects, programs and it's really an exciting organization.

Right now, here in Louisiana, we are in the beginning stages of a new administration with a new governor, Governor Landry and his administration, as well as a number of new state legislators where policymaking tends to have excitement early on in new administrations where we can try to impact the marketplace, where we think that business will benefit the most. So we're spending a lot of time right now at GNO Inc. doing that.

Just finished our legislative session with some really good outcomes and now we're turning our focus to the Super Bowl. We're hosting a Super Bowl here in New Orleans in February and the summer here has been touted as the summer of the Super Bowl. We have, I think, 500 infrastructure projects ongoing in the New Orleans area and GNO Inc. is helping lead that effort with a number of the public agencies to hopefully have our city nice and shiny, sparkling and looking good for when all the guests and eyeballs turn to New Orleans here in only nine months or so. It's getting close.

Karen Edwards: Right. Yeah, right around the corner. That's exciting.
So I'm just curious from the perspective of GNO Inc. and being an economic development organization, how do you talk about hurricanes and preparedness and how do you help businesses be ready to respond?

Chris Kane: Yeah, so our market, it's pretty easy to talk about. We've gotten whacked enough times that having the discussion and understanding the importance of hurricane preparedness is a hurdle that we don't have to waste a lot of time on, luckily.

Now, that being said, we also then have a unique, I guess, skill set or experience set on how to deal with post-hurricane events and particularly when it comes to rebuilding, property insurance, protecting and an infrastructure, making sure that the infrastructure is in place in advance of these storms.

So a lot of the effort we've made at GNO Inc., and coinciding with my practice, is resiliency. It's preparing not just for a hurricane to occur. We know that's going to happen. But it's preparing the infrastructure and trying to ensure that our utilities, such as our electrical electrical grid, which here recently in Louisiana, we had some major events with Hurricane Ida and Hurricane Laura, among others. But those two in particular, really challenged our electrical grid.

So when we start talking about rebuilding the electrical grid, for example, we don't want to just talk about putting it back to where it was. We know that infrastructure is not good enough. It just failed.

So we want to rebuild it, with an eye towards being able to sustain the next hurricane. And that's investing in hurricane preparedness for the longterm, not just preparing for putting the grid back in place and saying, "Okay, we're back to where we were."

It's a challenge. You got to make sure that you have identified the resources. It's very expensive and costly. There are engineering challenges with how to put back such a grid. And then there's the obvious, end of the day, a scarce resource of money, available funds.

But what we found is with our partners at the federal government and the priority of the locals in the state to focus on things like utility rebuilds and flood protection, we're able to get it done. And it's vastly improved from where we were 20 years ago, sitting here before Hurricane Katrina hit here.

Karen Edwards: Sure. And many communities have, they're called different things, but their community and economic development that local folks and business owners can get involved in. It seems like that alone would be a good resource for a small business owner.

Chris Kane: No, absolutely. At GNO Inc, in addition to the firm, both our resources for hurricane preparing, preparing for your business for a hurricane and providing resources and kind of stepping through what that looks like.

But to your point, getting engaged in an organization, a local organization or regional organization that works on policy, that focuses on economic development or rebuilding after disasters, such as GNO, Inc., is an excellent way to get ahead of the market and to prepare your company both for sustaining an emergency such as a hurricane, but also understanding the opportunities, identifying those opportunities and being prepared to take advantage of those opportunities and participate in them after an event.

So I think that's an excellent way for a business owner to get engaged. And volunteerism is, it takes time, but it's the cheapest way to provide a return for your community, but also your own business.

Karen Edwards: It is, and we've talked a lot about New Orleans, obviously, because that's where you are and that's where you're involved.
But if you think about the U.S., we've got Texas Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, the Northeast coast, there's a lot of areas of the country that have the potential to be impacted by a hurricane.
But then also that hurricane continues inland, and we have wind-driven rain and we have flooding, so just because you might not be in a coastal city, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a plan because it can still affect your part of the country.

Chris Kane: You're right. I learned that as a member of the firm, and we started getting phone calls, if you remember Hurricane Sandy, however many years ago that was, I guess maybe almost 10 years ago or so and really impacted the Northeast United States in a way that hurricanes hadn't impacted that region in quite some time.

And we got called upon to come help, and it was a post-recovery type of assistance due to our experience with other disasters here.
And when we began to have the conversations, we realized very quickly, these folks hadn't reviewed their insurance coverages. They weren't familiar with language in their contracts relative to force majeure and protections that you would want to see in contracts that could be impacted by disaster. They didn't have data backup. They didn't have photographs of their assets and their properties that you'd want to be able to quickly access, to show to your insurance carrier and those sorts of things. Weren't very familiar with what programs are out there to help small businesses recover quickly.

The Small Business Administration, the SBA, has a suite of services that it provides in disaster relief that are very accessible and relatively quick for government work. And a lot of folks don't know about it.

So when you hear about individuals or businesses who are not necessarily, don't feel like they are disaster-prone when they're hit, they're really, really behind the eight-ball.

And a short investment, a small investment of time and effort, can put you in a position to be ready for an event if it occurs. And as you mentioned, whether it's a hurricane coming inland or this spring particularly, we've had a number of calls for tornadoes, very active tornado season.

So it doesn't matter the form of the disaster it comes in, being prepared will let you sleep a little bit better at night and you'll be ready for it when it does.

Karen Edwards: Sure. It's like you go to the doctor for an annual checkup. Well, you should be doing the same for your business in terms of contract language, in terms of insurance coverage, in terms of understanding what you should document. You said photos, photos of your assets and store them in the cloud so that it's accessible. If your computers get fried or you have a flood and you lose stuff, you still have access to that information. There's no reason why things should be disappearing in this day and age of technology, right?

Chris Kane: That's right. Yeah. Document, document, document. Part of your business plan on a regular basis should be updating, making sure you've got a good list of your assets, you've got some form of understanding of the condition of that asset, whether it be by photographs or wherever it might be and preserving that information.
Along those same lines, particularly folks who deal with a lot of vendors or customers, you'll ask them, "Okay, do you have a written contract?"

"Yeah, we do."
"Well, let's look at it."
"Well, we can't find it."

And when you're in the middle of trying to recover from a hurricane and you're trying to understand how to access materials or what agreements you have in place with your customers, scrambling to try to find that information is not where you want to be. You want to be ahead of the curve and have all your information documented and well organized ahead of time. And it's good corporate hygiene anyway, but it's even more important when you're faced with trying to respond to a hurricane or other disaster.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. Such great points. And this is something that your team at Adams and Reese deals with every day You're looking at contracts, you're looking at businesses, you're kind of auditing and saying, "Hey, here's where we need to make some changes," or, "Here's where we could do better." Or you might even be like, "Wow, you did a great job," but it's still nice to bring in an expert and hopefully if you're listening to this now, you'll take some action.

And Chris, how can they contact you?

Chris Kane: Sure. I can be contacted at Christopher.Kane@ARLaw.com, through our website, ARLaw.com, AdamsandReese.com, is our website. Happy to help.

One of the things that I found, to your point, Karen, is a lot of individuals and businesses who, pre-COVID, had disaster recovery low on its list of priorities. COVID woke a lot of folks up to we need to be prepared and be nimble.

So the good thing is, I think, that most businesses, they have a better mindset walking into this and have the ability, whether it is to communicate remotely or do other things, that a simple five years ago wasn't priority and wasn't really in the mindset.

So we're coming at it from a point, I think, where a lot of folks are not far off from being well protected and having themselves prepared for a situation where they need to respond to an emergency.

But it is important to do and if you're hurricane-prone, now is the time to do it. Do it early in the season and get yourself ready.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, don't wait. That's a good point with COVID, too, because I live in Pennsylvania, we don't really get hurricanes. We just get rain from the hurricanes. And I'm like, "That's not going to happen to me."
But COVID, I mean, that affected everybody, no matter where you are in the country. And same. It doesn't have to be a hurricane or a weather event or tornadoes. It could be something like that similar situation. So just being prepared is the best course of action.

Chris Kane: Yeah.

Karen Edwards: Chris, this was a fantastic conversation today. I want to thank you so much for sharing your insight and for being here today.

Chris Kane: Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. Thank you.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. And remember, like he said, ARLaw.com or you could visit RoofersCoffeeShop.com and Adams and Reese does have a full directory on the site with their contact information and how to get a hold of them.

So I want to thank everybody out there for listening to this episode of Roofing Road Trips. Please subscribe, follow us on social media and listen to future episodes on whatever platform you prefer to hear your podcasts. And we'll see you on a future episode. Take care. Bye-bye.

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