Past disasters show a long recovery for small businesses
“You realize, there’s no one there. The workers didn’t have homes, the customers weren’t back. You start this long, slow crawl back to normal.” —MALCOLM CLARK, GOLDEN CORRAL
NEW YORK—After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, an antique store needed more than six years to fully recover. A Long Island restaurateur couldn’t reopen one of his locations for a year and a half after Superstorm Sandy struck in 2012.
For small businesses, the recovery from hurricanes and other natural disasters can take years—if they can recover at all. Business owners in Houston have only just started assessing their damage and how to move forward. Many may find themselves facing the same hurdles and delays as small business owners who have been through other big storms.
After Katrina, the city of Kenner, Louisiana, west of New Orleans, resembled a ghost town. The Golden Corral franchise restaurant there suffered extensive damage. Managers were able to hire a crew for repairs, and within 10 weeks the restaurant was fixed up enough to reopen. But there were few residents around, and only nine of 70 staffers were in town to run the place, says Malcolm Clark, the franchise’s director of operations.
“You realize, there’s no one there,” Clark says. “The workers didn’t have homes, the customers weren’t back. You start this long, slow crawl back to normal.”
At first, the Golden Corral could serve only lunch. The customers were construction workers and insurance adjusters. Sometimes it was difficult to get deliveries of food and supplies. It took a year after Katrina for the Golden Corral to be back to normal.
Still, the damage could have been worse, Clark says. The restaurant had gone through devastating hurricanes in the past and when it was rebuilt, it was constructed to be more stormproof. “We were lucky with that,” he says.
Bill Rau’s antique store in New Orleans’ French Quarter escaped heavy damage from Katrina, and was closed for just six weeks. But M.S. Rau Antiques had $5 million in damage to its inventory when its warehouse flooded, and it took a year and a half for the insurance company to reimburse him.
Even then, he said, the effects of Katrina lasted years because people thought that New Orleans remained under water. The number of visitors to New Orleans fell from 10.1 million in 2004 to 3.7 million