Portage Packaging Fire Recovery

When a blaze broke out seven winters ago in an enormous warehouse in the Midwest, it was not your standard industrial mishap. In fact, there was almost no structural damage. And nobody was aware of the fire when it was burning. It wasn’t discovered until several days had passed.
 
But the bizarre experience taught John Taucher some valuable lessons.
 
Taucher owns Portage Packaging Systems, Inc., an MDNA member business that operates from four Ohio facilities — two in Hiram and two others in nearby Ravenna, all located not far from Cleveland and Akron. Batteries ignited in a truck parked inside in a 70,000-square-foot building in Ravenna, in the dead of winter with conditions so cold that the heat from the resulting flames actually dissipated before it could reach the fire alarm sensors on the 42-foot-high ceiling. But where there’s fire, there’s usually smoke — and there was plenty of that.
 
“We turned the lights on and everything inside was very dim, because everything was covered in black soot,” Taucher recalls of the mess that greeted him when he returned from an out-of-town trip.  “Trucks, loaders, machinery — everything was coated. The garage doors were damaged, but that was about it.  The real work was clearing out and cleaning up.”
 
Before long, Taucher realized that his $50,000 business interruption insurance benefit fell well short of covering the cost of moving everything into a rental warehouse.
 
“It was a logistical nightmare,” he says. “That insurance works better in a retail setting that it did for us.”
 
Negotiating the ins and outs of the insurance and finding temporary quarters to keep Portage’s parts and installation services to the packaging industry operating smoothly took around nine months. Taucher hired independent insurance adjustor Neil Novak, of the Alex Sill Co., in Cleveland, to represent Portage in talks with insurers, and agreements were worked out. He was so pleased with the results that he later invited Novak to address in MDNA National Convention audience on dealing with business insurance challenges.