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Hurricane Damage Report: Small Business
Below the Surface
Damage from this summer's hurricanes goes beyond the physical.
But for Crocker and lots of other business owners along the route taken by Hurricane Frances in early September and by Hurricane Jeanne three weeks later, the real swath of destruction was the one that fell across the bottom line.
The first blow came in the form of postponed jobs.
A major out-of-state job was postponed when a project manager had to fly home to safeguard his house. A number of lucrative highway contracts were indefinitely postponed to keep the roads clear for evacuations. A week of cancellations and uncertainty was followed by a week of no electricity. Then came the backlog. Too many rescheduled jobs and overlapping deadlines.
"I'm sitting here trying to figure out how I'm going to man six jobs next week," Crocker said a week after Frances blew through. By month's end, his problems had been compounded. Hurricane Jeanne tore off part of the roof, and power was out again.
Phil Faherty, owner of a Stuart office supply business, was also watching the dominoes fall.
Despite the immediate problems, like the creeping mold invading his waterlogged building, Faherty worried that his biggest problems would turn out to be the ones he couldn't yet see. "It's the whole trickle down," he said. "How many businesses that we do business with are going to survive?"
Economic development officials along the Treasure Coast acknowledged that these kinds of losses were likely to exceed the cost of either storm's physical damage. And while insurance, grants and loans will help, some losses are likely to go unrecovered and uncounted.
Stuart/Martin County Chamber of Commerce President Joe Catrambone was swamped with calls for help from small-business owners struggling to keep things together.
He estimated the county's business losses could reach $1 billion when economic losses were factored in -- and that was before Jeanne hit.
Catrambone and officials from the chambers of commerce and economic development agencies in Indian River, Martin and St. Lucie counties were working with the governor's office to speed through zero-interest bridge loans from the state for businesses damaged by the storm. The loans, however, are not available to businesses without physical storm damage.
