Print Solutions Magazine, February 2005 -- Cover Story: Devestation, Recovery and Moving Ahead, Page 1

A flash flood nearly destroyed the business at Trends Presentation Products
and Enduro Binders. Today both firms are reaching new heights.

BY DARIN PAINTER

It’s a warm Saturday—May 6, 2000—and many citizens of Washington, Mo., a small city on the south bank of the Missouri River, are sharing the news: scattered evening showers. East-central Missouri hasn’t seen rain in weeks, and the drought affecting rural communities is news in papers statewide. A little rain sounds good to Michael Maune, who plans to attend a wedding tonight with his wife and some friends.

No matter what happens in the atmosphere, Maune is on Cloud Nine: Business at Enduro Binders Inc., the company he launched in 1982, is unusually busy. The firm has a large backlog of jobs awaiting production in its 65,000-foot, $2.5 million, aluminum-sided plant, located in the Robert Miller Industrial Park on the west side of town. Several key orders are awaiting shipment on the company’s dock.

Enduro serves a distinct, profitable niche—county governments that need well-crafted, heavy-duty binders to protect public information records such as births, deaths and mortgages. Maune’s firm, which is owned by Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (ACS), makes binders in a variety of styles and materials, including canvas and leather. The company’s 120 employees are well-known in the binder industry for their ability to hand-sew sheets to binders’ guards, allowing pages to lay flat instead of arch in the middle when binders are open, and their ability to produce metal-edged index tabs.

Tonight, Maune also is energized because Trends Presentation Products, Enduro’s sister company, rebranded itself a few weeks ago and is expected to grow its sales 20 percent in 2000. The company sells exclusively through distributors who offer binders and packaging for commercial marketing applications.

Matt Gildehaus, Trends Presentation Products’ marketing manager, was the impetus behind the company’s birth. This weekend, he’s in Orlando, Fla., visiting his sister. When he returns to the plant Monday morning, he expects to mail 400 letters and brochures to prospects, telling them about Trends’ new Xeikon digital press and the company’s ability to produce special sizes, small quantities and decorative features.

Before dark, Maune and his wife arrive at the wedding. At about 9 p.m., someone at the reception mentions that it’s raining, and he and a group of friends step outside to look. Finally, Maune recalls thinking. We need it. Wedding guests eat and dance, and the rain begins to fall with more force. When Maune and his wife leave at midnight, he turns to friends and says, “The rain can stop anytime now.” With their car’s windshield wipers on high, they strain to see the road.

No one in Washington knows it yet, but an extraordinary event is taking place in the sky.

Skies Open, Companies Close

On most days, St. John’s Creek is an innocuous stream with scattered rocks. With careful steps, local kids can cross its two feet of water in less than a minute. At the Robert Miller Industrial Park, the creek runs beneath a small bridge, then turns left behind a few buildings.

On the evening of May 6, 2000, St. John’s Creek is little more than a trickle. Equally unremarkable is the weather pattern: A week-old low pressure system is losing strength, moving northeast across southern Missouri. One unusual feature of the system is that it lacks the defined boundary that typifies most major nighttime storms. In the Midwest during the summer, most severe storms are fast-moving and well-defined.

Ahead of the system are atmospheric ingredients that will make the storm famous in the world of meteorology.

First, there is a high “lift index.” This is obtained by computing the temperature that air near the ground would be if it were lifted to 18,000 feet, then comparing that figure to the actual air temperature at that height. The greater the difference, the more unstable the atmosphere.

Unstable air increases the chance of fast-moving currents of rising air, called “updrafts.” When fast updrafts occur on an unusually moist night—and this night was nearly twice as humid as normal—moisture often condenses into thunderstorm cells. A high lift index also produces a weak “outflow boundary,” the front edge of the storm that usually moves from west to east. When the outflow boundary is weak, new thunderstorm cells develop close to existing ones.

Another ingredient was weak “wind shear,” which is the variation in wind speed and direction at different heights. When shear is weak but lift is high, precipitation tends to occur close to the updraft. In those cases, thunderstorms appear near the center of storm systems instead of on the leading or trailing edges.

All of these factors combined to create a huge complex of strong thunderstorms at about the same time Maune and his wife left the wedding.

But there was more.

The front edge of the storm aligned itself nearly parallel to the wind and perpendicular to the jet stream. Above Maune and his community, the storm had parked itself where it would remain stationary for eight hours, uninterrupted in its development of new thunderstorm cells and with an unlimited supply of moisture provided by the jet stream. The predicted “scattered showers” became a nightmare downpour for east-central Missouri.

According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, the back edge of the system moved only 14 miles in seven hours. So much rain fell so fast that many people in east-central Missouri were unaware they were in peril until tornado sirens sounded about 1 a.m. Two people died during the night when their cars overturned in flood waters.

The National Weather Service has hundreds of official weather gauges nationwide, and one of them (named UMNM7) is in Union, Mo., eight miles south of Washington. From 1 a.m. to 2:30 a.m., rain pounded the gauge at a rate of 4.5 inches an hour. The daily rainfall total for May 7 in Union was 13.53 inches. (The winter-storm equivalent is more than 10 feet of snow.) More than 1,900 square miles received at least six inches of rain during the night, according to National Weather Service data.

Once a trickle, St. John’s Creek became an 18-foot torrent, replete with white caps and waves. When the storm dissipated and moved southeast at 6 a.m., the companies’ parking lot and grounds were flooded with more than six feet of water.

Carrying flashlights and wearing boots, Operations Manager Daryl Lamb and a few co-workers navigated soaked streets and entered the plant at 10 p.m. Sunday. Will we be put back together? he remembers thinking before entering. Is the company gone? “We all had invested so much time and knowledge here,” he says. “I needed to know what it looked like inside.”

It was devastated. The 52-inch water level inside covered file drawers containing operating, financial and customer records. Computers, production equipment, raw materials and finished goods were strewn across the floor, which was covered with three feet of thick mud. Completed jobs on the loading dock were drenched or missing. Heavy equipment in the production area and furniture in offices were overturned as if ransacked. Lamb correctly figured that everything digital—including Trends Presentation Products’ new Xeikon machine—was destroyed. “It was an intense, gut-wrenching feeling,” Lamb says. “It almost felt like a death in the family.”

Finished visiting his sister in Orlando, Gildehaus prepared to board a plane Sunday for St. Louis when he heard a TV news anchor mention a weather phenomenon in Union, Mo. “I turned around and couldn’t believe what I had just heard—Union,” he says. “I arrived at work Monday ready to send those 400 brochures. I had no idea how devastated everything was. Going from an intensely positive feeling about your business to an intense grief is strange. It didn’t take us long to realize we couldn’t dwell on the tragedy for long. If we ever had a chance to prove ourselves as a company that was together, dedicated and hard-working, this was it.”

Deep Piles of Trash, Deeper Sense of Community

Flood damage totaled more than $110 million in Franklin County, where more than 500 single-family homes and more than 100 mobile homes were damaged or destroyed. On Monday morning, most employees of Enduro and Trends who arrived at the plant gawked in disbelief. “The first decision we had to make was whether we wanted to try to get through the disaster at all, or just call off the dogs,” Maune says. “Either way seemed understandable because it looked like we were going to be wiped out for a long time.”

Employees, many of whom have worked at the same place for more than 20 years, overwhelmingly said they wanted to recover. They began by removing mud from the building. They formed large trash piles in the parking lot and in the wet grass, renting Ryder trucks for temporary storage. (The firm’s trash bill would total more than $50,000.) Then, they started to distinguish salvageable goods, equipment and records from non-salvageable ones. It soon became clear that everything electronic, including Trends’ entire art department and its new Xeikon press, was ruined. Maune told everyone to focus on saving Enduro’s county-records business because its mechanical equipment such as punch presses and glue machines had a better chance to be cleaned, dried and salvaged.

On Monday, the companies’ leaders decided that the only wrong decisions would be non-decisions, no matter how important they seemed. “We had so many snap decisions to make, the worst thing we could do was seek consensus for everything,” Lamb says. Equipment deemed salvageable was taken apart piece by piece to be cleaned or oiled, and paper records were inventoried and placed in special containers for drying. Because the building’s phone systems weren’t operational, some salespeople and customer service staff used home phones and calling cards to notify customers about the tragedy. “Our employees came together and sacrificed like never before,” Lamb says. “People who normally didn’t talk to each other worked side by side.”

During the first week, Gildehaus entered the flooded building and found his Rolodex lying in thick mud. He took the Rolodex home, spread a towel across his kitchen table and began calling Trends’ customers. What was he supposed to feel? The business he had conceived and launched in 1990 was kaput, and he was tired from lack of sleep. “Most clients had no real comprehension about how bad it was,” he says. “Few people believed me when I said we might never be back.” Gildehaus decided he would recommend the best possible competing binder companies to clients based on the clients’ specific projects, budgets and locations. He also decided not to act as a distributor himself, taking orders from customers and outsourcing work to those suppliers. “I figured if we were fair and honest, we’d be better suited to earn their business and trust back when we were up and running again, if that ever happened,” he says.

Ron King, president of Binder Graphics & Packaging, St. Louis, had two large jobs, as well as art and tooling dies, in the plant when it flooded. A Trends customer from the start, the company sells binders to a variety of end users, including a national telephone company and several image-conscious graphic design agencies. King explained the situation to his clients and moved the orders to a binder manufacturer in Indiana. “It became a waiting game, but I felt like Trends handled everything as professionally as possible,” King says. Binder Graphics & Packaging once again is one of Trends’ best customers.

Employees, a disaster recovery team that ACS hired and temporary workers tried to save the most recent two years’ worth of job tickets, placing them in milk crates and drying them with dehumidifiers. “It was a long, arduous process, and we made copies of anything we could,” Lamb says. Marvin E. Carlson, a reserve public affairs officer for the Washington, D.C.-based Federal Emergency Management Agency, was on assignment in Missouri during the late spring of 2000. In an article published in Disaster Recovery Journal, he praised the companies’ disaster strategies but mentioned that freeze-drying the records would have been more effective. Rapid molding of the wet material occurred, and most of the firms’ computer records were lost, causing hundreds of hours of reconstruction with assistance from customers and suppliers, he reported.

Ironically, the companies’ flooded building was built five feet higher than engineers and insurance professionals recommended. It was within what’s called the “500-year designation,” meaning the odds of a flood were 0.2 percent annually. Enduro had a
$5 million insurance policy, and it received a full check in about a week. Combined, both businesses’ first-year revenue losses were $2.5 million, and physical losses (including the flooded building’s contents) were approximately $7.5 million. Also, Enduro was advised by its agent that flood-related damages wouldn’t be covered in the future, and that its $10 million business continuity coverage had a flood-loss exemption clause.

“From a personal perspective, the immediate loss of equipment and inventory was less of a devastating aspect than the question of how we were going to rebuild the business from ground zero,” Gildehaus says. “How would we retain customers without a communications system and without a building? How would we reacquire our capabilities?” Continued...

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	A flash flood nearly destroyed the business at Trends Presentation Products and Enduro Binders. Today both firms are reaching new heights. BY DARIN PAINTER It’s a warm Saturday—May 6, 2000—and many citizens of Washington, Mo., a small city on the south bank of the Missouri River, are sharing the news: scattered evening showers. East-central Missouri hasn’t seen rain in weeks, and the drought affecting rural communities is news in papers statewide. A little rain sounds good to Michael Maune, who plans to attend a wedding tonight with his wife and some friends. No matter what happens in the atmosphere, Maune is on Cloud Nine: Business at Enduro Binders Inc., the company he launched in 1982, is unusually busy. The firm has a large backlog of jobs awaiting production in its 65,000-foot, $2.5 million, aluminum-sided plant, located in the Robert Miller Industrial Park on the west side of town. Several key orders are awaiting shipment on the company’s dock. Enduro serves a distinct, profitable niche—county governments that need well-crafted, heavy-duty binders to protect public information records such as births, deaths and mortgages. Maune’s firm, which is owned by Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (ACS), makes binders in a variety of styles and materials, including canvas and leather. The company’s 120 employees are well-known in the binder industry for their ability to hand-sew sheets to binders’ guards, allowing pages to lay flat instead of arch in the middle when binders are open, and their ability to produce metal-edged index tabs. Tonight, Maune also is energized because Trends Presentation Products, Enduro’s sister company, rebranded itself a few weeks ago and is expected to grow its sales 20 percent in 2000. The company sells exclusively through distributors who offer binders and packaging for commercial marketing applications. Matt Gildehaus, Trends Presentation Products’ marketing manager, was the impetus behind the company’s birth. This weekend, he’s in Orlando, Fla., visiting his sister. When he returns to the plant Monday morning, he expects to mail 400 letters and brochures to prospects, telling them about Trends’ new Xeikon digital press and the company’s ability to produce special sizes, small quantities and decorative features. Before dark, Maune and his wife arrive at the wedding. At about 9 p.m., someone at the reception mentions that it’s raining, and he and a group of friends step outside to look. Finally, Maune recalls thinking. We need it. Wedding guests eat and dance, and the rain begins to fall with more force. When Maune and his wife leave at midnight, he turns to friends and says, “The rain can stop anytime now.” With their car’s windshield wipers on high, they strain to see the road. No one in Washington knows it yet, but an extraordinary event is taking place in the sky. Skies Open, Companies Close On most days, St. John’s Creek is an innocuous stream with scattered rocks. With careful steps, local kids can cross its two feet of water in less than a minute. At the Robert Miller Industrial Park, the creek runs beneath a small bridge, then turns left behind a few buildings. On the evening of May 6, 2000, St. John’s Creek is little more than a trickle. Equally unremarkable is the weather pattern: A week-old low pressure system is losing strength, moving northeast across southern Missouri. One unusual feature of the system is that it lacks the defined boundary that typifies most major nighttime storms. In the Midwest during the summer, most severe storms are fast-moving and well-defined. Ahead of the system are atmospheric ingredients that will make the storm famous in the world of meteorology. First, there is a high “lift index.” This is obtained by computing the temperature that air near the ground would be if it were lifted to 18,000 feet, then comparing that figure to the actual air temperature at that height. The greater the difference, the more unstable the atmosphere. Unstable air increases the chance of fast-moving currents of rising air, called “updrafts.” When fast updrafts occur on an unusually moist night—and this night was nearly twice as humid as normal—moisture often condenses into thunderstorm cells. A high lift index also produces a weak “outflow boundary,” the front edge of the storm that usually moves from west to east. When the outflow boundary is weak, new thunderstorm cells develop close to existing ones. Another ingredient was weak “wind shear,” which is the variation in wind speed and direction at different heights. When shear is weak but lift is high, precipitation tends to occur close to the updraft. In those cases, thunderstorms appear near the center of storm systems instead of on the leading or trailing edges. All of these factors combined to create a huge complex of strong thunderstorms at about the same time Maune and his wife left the wedding. But there was more. The front edge of the storm aligned itself nearly parallel to the wind and perpendicular to the jet stream. Above Maune and his community, the storm had parked itself where it would remain stationary for eight hours, uninterrupted in its development of new thunderstorm cells and with an unlimited supply of moisture provided by the jet stream. The predicted “scattered showers” became a nightmare downpour for east-central Missouri. According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, the back edge of the system moved only 14 miles in seven hours. So much rain fell so fast that many people in east-central Missouri were unaware they were in peril until tornado sirens sounded about 1 a.m. Two people died during the night when their cars overturned in flood waters. The National Weather Service has hundreds of official weather gauges nationwide, and one of them (named UMNM7) is in Union, Mo., eight miles south of Washington. From 1 a.m. to 2:30 a.m., rain pounded the gauge at a rate of 4.5 inches an hour. The daily rainfall total for May 7 in Union was 13.53 inches. (The winter-storm equivalent is more than 10 feet of snow.) More than 1,900 square miles received at least six inches of rain during the night, according to National Weather Service data. Once a trickle, St. John’s Creek became an 18-foot torrent, replete with white caps and waves. When the storm dissipated and moved southeast at 6 a.m., the companies’ parking lot and grounds were flooded with more than six feet of water. Carrying flashlights and wearing boots, Operations Manager Daryl Lamb and a few co-workers navigated soaked streets and entered the plant at 10 p.m. Sunday. Will we be put back together? he remembers thinking before entering. Is the company gone? “We all had invested so much time and knowledge here,” he says. “I needed to know what it looked like inside.” It was devastated. The 52-inch water level inside covered file drawers containing operating, financial and customer records. Computers, production equipment, raw materials and finished goods were strewn across the floor, which was covered with three feet of thick mud. Completed jobs on the loading dock were drenched or missing. Heavy equipment in the production area and furniture in offices were overturned as if ransacked. Lamb correctly figured that everything digital—including Trends Presentation Products’ new Xeikon machine—was destroyed. “It was an intense, gut-wrenching feeling,” Lamb says. “It almost felt like a death in the family.” Finished visiting his sister in Orlando, Gildehaus prepared to board a plane Sunday for St. Louis when he heard a TV news anchor mention a weather phenomenon in Union, Mo. “I turned around and couldn’t believe what I had just heard—Union,” he says. “I arrived at work Monday ready to send those 400 brochures. I had no idea how devastated everything was. Going from an intensely positive feeling about your business to an intense grief is strange. It didn’t take us long to realize we couldn’t dwell on the tragedy for long. If we ever had a chance to prove ourselves as a company that was together, dedicated and hard-working, this was it.” Deep Piles of Trash, Deeper Sense of Community Flood damage totaled more than $110 million in Franklin County, where more than 500 single-family homes and more than 100 mobile homes were damaged or destroyed. On Monday morning, most employees of Enduro and Trends who arrived at the plant gawked in disbelief. “The first decision we had to make was whether we wanted to try to get through the disaster at all, or just call off the dogs,” Maune says. “Either way seemed understandable because it looked like we were going to be wiped out for a long time.” Employees, many of whom have worked at the same place for more than 20 years, overwhelmingly said they wanted to recover. They began by removing mud from the building. They formed large trash piles in the parking lot and in the wet grass, renting Ryder trucks for temporary storage. (The firm’s trash bill would total more than $50,000.) Then, they started to distinguish salvageable goods, equipment and records from non-salvageable ones. It soon became clear that everything electronic, including Trends’ entire art department and its new Xeikon press, was ruined. Maune told everyone to focus on saving Enduro’s county-records business because its mechanical equipment such as punch presses and glue machines had a better chance to be cleaned, dried and salvaged. On Monday, the companies’ leaders decided that the only wrong decisions would be non-decisions, no matter how important they seemed. “We had so many snap decisions to make, the worst thing we could do was seek consensus for everything,” Lamb says. Equipment deemed salvageable was taken apart piece by piece to be cleaned or oiled, and paper records were inventoried and placed in special containers for drying. Because the building’s phone systems weren’t operational, some salespeople and customer service staff used home phones and calling cards to notify customers about the tragedy. “Our employees came together and sacrificed like never before,” Lamb says. “People who normally didn’t talk to each other worked side by side.” During the first week, Gildehaus entered the flooded building and found his Rolodex lying in thick mud. He took the Rolodex home, spread a towel across his kitchen table and began calling Trends’ customers. What was he supposed to feel? The business he had conceived and launched in 1990 was kaput, and he was tired from lack of sleep. “Most clients had no real comprehension about how bad it was,” he says. “Few people believed me when I said we might never be back.” Gildehaus decided he would recommend the best possible competing binder companies to clients based on the clients’ specific projects, budgets and locations. He also decided not to act as a distributor himself, taking orders from customers and outsourcing work to those suppliers. “I figured if we were fair and honest, we’d be better suited to earn their business and trust back when we were up and running again, if that ever happened,” he says. Ron King, president of Binder Graphics & Packaging, St. Louis, had two large jobs, as well as art and tooling dies, in the plant when it flooded. A Trends customer from the start, the company sells binders to a variety of end users, including a national telephone company and several image-conscious graphic design agencies. King explained the situation to his clients and moved the orders to a binder manufacturer in Indiana. “It became a waiting game, but I felt like Trends handled everything as professionally as possible,” King says. Binder Graphics & Packaging once again is one of Trends’ best customers. Employees, a disaster recovery team that ACS hired and temporary workers tried to save the most recent two years’ worth of job tickets, placing them in milk crates and drying them with dehumidifiers. “It was a long, arduous process, and we made copies of anything we could,” Lamb says. Marvin E. Carlson, a reserve public affairs officer for the Washington, D.C.-based Federal Emergency Management Agency, was on assignment in Missouri during the late spring of 2000. In an article published in Disaster Recovery Journal, he praised the companies’ disaster strategies but mentioned that freeze-drying the records would have been more effective. Rapid molding of the wet material occurred, and most of the firms’ computer records were lost, causing hundreds of hours of reconstruction with assistance from customers and suppliers, he reported. Ironically, the companies’ flooded building was built five feet higher than engineers and insurance professionals recommended. It was within what’s called the “500-year designation,” meaning the odds of a flood were 0.2 percent annually. Enduro had a $5 million insurance policy, and it received a full check in about a week. Combined, both businesses’ first-year revenue losses were $2.5 million, and physical losses (including the flooded building’s contents) were approximately $7.5 million. Also, Enduro was advised by its agent that flood-related damages wouldn’t be covered in the future, and that its $10 million business continuity coverage had a flood-loss exemption clause. “From a personal perspective, the immediate loss of equipment and inventory was less of a devastating aspect than the question of how we were going to rebuild the business from ground zero,” Gildehaus says. “How would we retain customers without a communications system and without a building? How would we reacquire our capabilities?” Continued...