#49 Chuck Miccolis: Preparing Facilities for Severe Weather

Episode #49

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Introduction: 

Welcome to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast brought to you by FlowPath. I'm your host, Griffin Hamilton. This is the show where I interview industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights into modern day facilities management, from hospitality to commercial real estate, and everything in between. We'll learn what it really takes to succeed as a facilities manager. 

Griffin Hamilton  

Welcome to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast brought to you by FlowPath. Today I have the pleasure of having Chuck Miccolis on as a guest out of Tampa, Florida. Chuck, how you doing?

Chuck Miccolis 

I'm doing great, Griffin. Thanks for having me.

Griffin Hamilton  

Of course and I know you and I have talked about our connection here in being from Florida. I was actually down in Tampa a couple of weeks back for a wedding and a quick shout out to the newlyweds of the doobies, but I'm really glad that we were able to connect and with you being in Florida that's going to be a great location coming from as we're talking about severe weather and the impact on facilities, but before we do get into that why don't you tell the audience a little bit more about who you are and what exactly is it you do?

Chuck Nicholas  

Okay, thanks again. So yes, my name is Chuck Miccolis. I'm the managing director of commercial lines here at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. I have the pleasure of managing the IBHS business protection team along with providing technical content and management of our commercial property loss reduction programs. I oversee development and strategy for our fortified commercial and fortified multifamily program which includes a set of building resilience standards. I also provide engineering support for commercial building related hazard mitigation that includes testing and our one of the kind of research center in South Carolina and we conduct field research that also involves our member companies. We partner with various trade organizations to go out and do loss investigations and conduct research and prior to coming to IBHS in 2010, I was a field person for a couple of large insurance companies where I would go out and do loss investigations, primarily after wind events, hurricanes and I'd also do field inspections of large commercial structures and properties to make sure that they are properly protected against various risks, primarily wind and flood and then if they weren't, I would help them create a pathway to creating more resilient buildings. 

Griffin Hamilton  

So you had the perspective of going in after an event and evaluating, but also were there helping mitigate that risk on the front end?

Chuck Miccolis

Yes, that's right. So I would I would go to these facilities and I would talk with them after I'd done an inspection. So I'd get up on the roof, I would look at the most vulnerable parts of a building, their roof, critical utilities, things of that nature, and then give them a detailed, basically evaluation of what they can expect to happen in the event of a hurricane or something like that and then most of the time it didn't hit the places that I was just at, but I would go out and look at areas where there was destruction and devastation and displacement of folks from their homes and their businesses and get an understanding of how those building structures performed. 

Griffin Hamilton  

That's really interesting and I'm very excited to have this conversation because it hits home for me, personally, again, being from Florida and I can remember 2005 in particular, we had I think four or five hurricanes in the span of three months come in and hit the state. It's one of those things where it happened so frequently and there are some parts of the state that they just kept avoiding it over and over again and you do kind of get this sense of it's not that big of a deal. The urgency isn't there, but then when it finally does happen, it's just complete and utter devastation. So I imagine that's the case with commercial buildings, did you find that to be the case?

Chuck Miccolis 

Yes, so there have been many times when I would be speaking to someone about their exposures and the vulnerabilities to a hurricane and I would get some times, well, hurricane hasn't hit here in many years, in decades and Tampa is kind of one of those locations where we seem to dodged a lot of bullets. I've heard all kinds of theories that there's Indian tribes that have put a spell on the area and we don't get hit by hurricanes here, but it's kind of just a roll of the dice and these sometimes becomes this complacency and that sometimes the weather forecasts and can be sensationalized, but all it takes is one major storm to hit and forecasting has gotten a lot better nowadays. So if you're in that cone of error and its three days then you can be pretty confident you're going to get hit. As you mentioned, the 2004, 2005 seasons, we did have a lot of storms come on tracking across the state and one of them Hurricane Charley was supposed to hit Tampa and then it dove in South and hit the Punta Gorda area and destroyed that area, but if that storm had hit Tampa, Tampa area would look a whole lot different today. 

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah and that's what's scary, like I said, it just takes one event and I think there's a lot of people listening that aren't located in the southeast or they're not really in the area that they're at risk for hurricanes, but this isn't necessarily just for hurricanes, right? It's any type of severe weather that you were going in and it was pertaining to hurricanes and strong winds, but if you look at that across the country, each geographical region has their own severe weather and that's the topic here is proper preparation.

Chuck Miccolis

Yeah, so Griffin you're spot on. So a couple of thoughts come to mind. Number one, hurricanes are no longer just a coastal event, they go inland, and they can dump massive amounts of rain and wind, far interior from the coastline and then as we're all seeing the weather patterns now, I mean, this year alone, we're seeing storm after storm, just march across the country and those storms bring severe winds and wind driven rain and hail and tornadoes in areas that historically did not have that much of events like this. So it's becoming more frequent and it's shifting from different parts of the country now. So every part of the country is getting hit and there's a statistic floating around that basically says that 40% of people have experienced some type of severe weather events and it displaces people from their homes, it destroys communities, and it destroys businesses. So you're right, this is something that our entire country has to be on the lookout for.

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and let's tie that back into the corporate world because the majority of people listening to this podcast, are managing corporate facilities and they are tasked with thinking ahead and whether that's safety for your personnel in there, or the safety of the actual building, they have to have a plan A, B, and C in place in order to be prepared for these events that don't regularly happen and so let's dive into that and the different best practices one could take to mitigate these types of risks.

Chuck Miccolis

Yeah, absolutely. So let me just start off a little bit with kind of explaining what we do at IBHS in general, you've heard a little bit about my background, but let me just kind of give some perspective on what we do at IBHS and how we come up with some of this information. So IBHS or the Insurance Institute for business and home safety that's a mouthful right there, right? So we use the acronym IBHS is a nonprofit scientific research organization that is supported by property insurers and reinsurers. You've heard of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, they crash test cars. Well, we crash test buildings and homes. So we have the unique capability of doing full scale testing of one and two story structures, homes and businesses and we can put them up to the test against a category three hurricanes up to about 130 miles per hour. We do hail testing as well and we do water intrusion so wind driven rain that can enter through the buildings, siding and windows and roof systems and we also do wildfire testing. 

So we create realistic embers and we can check out the performance of different types of structures, what the ignition sources are, what type of defensible space you need between different types of structures. So we couple our research with the field research too, to make sure that we can replicate what's really going on with Mother Nature. So that has given us the ability to provide tangible solutions and practical guidance to the public to help them better weather these severe weather events. So there's a couple of things that folks want to be cognizant of and what to do. So you want to have a plan, just like you said, Griffin, that you need to have some kind of plan and that plan should include protecting the building itself, and then protecting all the different operations that take place in that building. So there's a business continuity side of it that you want to make sure that all your data is protected, all your internal strategies that will help reduce any business downtime and then you also want to have a plan that you're going to go and you're going to protect the building structure itself, an emergency response and recovery plan. So that's where you want to look at the most vulnerable parts of your building. So would you like me to just kind of dive right in? 

Griffin Hamilton  

Absolutely, you're on a roll here and I don't want to stop you.

Chuck Miccolis

Alright, sounds great. So your business continuity plan is going to make up for different parts of the year. So there's things that you can do in the off season that may be the larger ticket items and that would be if you have any kind of roof issues, you want to inspect it, you want to take care of it, you want to do any kind of repairs, if you're going to replace it, you should do it with something that is known and tested and there are different approvals out there, we have a whole guidance, a voluntary set of construction standards and are fortified programs that are that are free and available at our website fortifiedhome.org will take you to there, but let's stay just focused on what are the some of the steps that you can do. 

So your roof is your buildings first line of defense, right? So if you keep your roof on then your building is going to be in a pretty good shape. So you want to make sure that you inspect the roof drainage system as well. So you want to make sure that the water is coming off of your roof and that holds true for like a steep slope roof that has shingles, or if it's a flat roof, that is common as well. You want to make sure that there's no roof cover tears, any kind of bubbles. If you have shingles, you want to make sure that they're not curling, you want to inspect for loose shingles because they're going to come off in a wind event and then there's something that goes around the edge of the building and or the home and its called flashing or a drip edge that is really the first line of defense for your roof. So if you can keep that tight that will help your roof really perform better. If you have roof mounted equipment, you want to make sure that that is all well secured. If you have lightning protection systems, you want to make sure that they are secured and then not going to come loose and then kind of whipped down on the roof. Anything up on the roof, roof hatches, solar panels, you want to make sure that's all very well secured. 

If we work our way down the building a little bit your windows, you want to make sure everything is sealed up and cocked really well because you can get a lot of wind driven rain coming in through there. Any kind of large commercial doors, garage doors, overhead doors, you want to make sure that they are also tight and they're well attached to the structure itself with the brackets and the rollers and if there's any kind of major damage to those doors, you want to get those repaired as well in advance of any kind of storms. 

So some last minute things that you could do and getting close to storm season which seems to be about all year round nowadays. So you want to obviously secure any outdoor equipment. So either bring it in or make sure that it is secured to the ground bolted down. You don't want that to become loose debris flying around. Trim any trees, you don't want leaves and sticks getting into your gutters and that drainage system we mentioned earlier and if you have a generator, make sure it works, service it, test it, you want that to work properly for you when you really need it most.

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah and I think a common theme here that we could see is this is all proactive, right? This is something where it's difficult to do all of these tasks last minute, as you got the three day forecast coming up. This is something that should be done on a regular basis to make sure you're prepared in that type of situation and I feel like I say it almost every episode, but it goes along with that theme of preventative maintenance and preventative task to be proactive and prepared as best as you possibly can and this is no different.

Chuck Miccolis

Yes, Griffin, you're absolutely right and we have some tools that again, are free to the public. So if you just want to go to disastersafety.org and you'll see some tips on thunderstorms. So we have a couple of things that are called thunderstorm ready, specific to interior parts of the country and it talks about hail too, you want to be careful hail, and you want to make sure that you put some kind of hail protection around roof mat equipment and skylights. We also have a section called hurricane ready. So if you're in a hurricane prone area, and you want to, you know protect your facility against hurricanes, it'll give you some guidance on that, there's a little bit of a difference between the two and then we also have a couple of programs where you can fill out some templates for your facility, under our business protection section and two of those programs are called Easy Prep. So that is a step by step guidance that will help you methodically protect your building throughout the year. 

So as we just said, you can't do everything within a day of the storm coming or thunderstorms coming across the country. So this will give you tips on the larger ticket items that you could do in the off season, what materials you want to get to be ready and then it'll bring you down or the kind of that countdown five days out, three days out or in a couple of days out and then what do you do during the storm and what do you do after the storm. We have also another toolkit that is available to everybody and that's called OFBEZ, so open for business and basically that will help walk you through understanding what your risks are, knowing your employees, your equipment, your customer-supplier relationships, backing up data, all that non tangible side of the house that you want to make sure is in good order. So we've provided some good steps and tips and guidance for folks to get through these storms and really minimize the disruption to their lives and their livelihood. 

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah and this is all going to be tagged in the show notes here. So if you are in need, or if you're curious to look up any additional content, we'll have links here for you to reference. The next question I had, perhaps a little bit off from where you're going here, but just out of my own curiosity, from a compliance or insurance perspective, what kind of impact or what kind of requirements does an insurance provider have for this kind of preparation to prevent any catastrophic costs from occurring?

Chuck Miccolis

So insurance companies look at risk, right? So how they will look at your facility, they would judge your risk and if you have a lot of these plans and documentation on the roof, how it was built or replaced, they're going to look at that and include that and look at how they want to assess your risk. So, basically, if you've done a lot of good things to improve your risk, then that's going to be you know, a much better situation for the insurance company. They, just as much as homeowners don't want to see the losses and building owners and what I really try to impress upon people is that yes, a lot of times they go right to the insurance side of things, but you insurance in general does not cover what I call the total calamity cost. So what that is, that is everything that you will have to endure when there's a significant loss or disruption to your business. So it's not going to cover the stress to your employees, it's not going to cover the downtime with how that affects the community and these are important sides of things. We've seen communities dry up if you don't have businesses around then local people won't be able to make money. So just like if the homes are damaged then they won't have a place to live. So it's really important that we look at this from a holistic perspective. So homes, we want to be strengthen businesses, we want to have strengthen too. So it's really important that we look at this as how can we keep our businesses going?

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, that's huge points to make there because I think a lot of people are or can be short sighted and they don't see the big picture of and the overall impact that can have not only on them, their personal lives, the company, but the community, as you just mentioned, that's an excellent point to bring up.

Chuck Miccolis

You know it's funny too, everyone likes to blame everything on COVID lately, right, and there's a lot of tragic situations going on, but one of them is a very real situation and that is the supply chain issue. So what happens now is that if you've got a home or business and you don't need a bunch of materials to rebuild, that's a very nice thing because what happens is when there's these large storms that come through, when there's a wide swath of destruction, well, that puts stress on the supply chain as well. So if you need drywall, if you need a roofing product, you may not get it in in a week or two, like you normally would, it may take a couple months, so you're going to be down a lot longer now. So the environment for reconstruction is not favorable and you don't want to put your toes in that water if you don't need to.

Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, you're not kidding at all. So I guess going back into additional best practices here, what are some additional takeaways I should have as a facilities manager walking away from this conversation?

Chuck Miccolis

Well, one of the most important things is that while we are seeing weather events may be more frequent and more severe, there are very science backed actions that you can take to reduce the damages to your building. We're not powerless, there are steps that we can take to help protect our valuable assets and livelihood and it's all worth it. A lot of people say, I don't have the time, I don't have the money. There have been studies that if you invest $1, it's going to save you $4 on recovery costs, it is all doable. It's an investment, it's not an expense, if you take care of your roof, the roofs going to take care of you. You can really protect your facility and it'll all pay for itself in one storm. If you invest some money up front, you're going to have a lot of savings on the other side of a storm and it's not a question of if, it is a question of when, I mean, we're all going to get hit with something at some point, even Tampa. 

Griffin Hamilton  

That is one of the other things, you're looking at your building and as new construction is popping up, I mean, it's not a building for ten years that's not the investment people are making. It's fifty or hundred plus years for a building to be up and running and so that's the one in hundred year storm. Well, statistically your building or at least hopefully is going to have one of those hundred year storms.

Chuck Miccolis

Yes, absolutely and it seems like they're not happening every hundred years either.

Griffin Hamilton  

No, unfortunately not. Well, hey, Chuck, I really do appreciate you coming on here and talk to us a little bit more about your background and the measures we can take to prepare for these types of events, but one last question before I let you run, who or what has had the biggest impact on you and your career?

Chuck Miccolis

Who or what? That's a great question. Well, I would tell you living in Florida probably has had the biggest impact on my career and seeing things firsthand. There's something called the Waffle House index, right? I think that we've talked about a little.

Griffin Hamilton  

I'm in Atlanta, so I'm very well aware of the Waffle House index

Chuck Miccolis

Absolutely, I mean the index. So that started with the director of FEMA at one point, Craig Fugate and basically what he did is for the folks who've never heard this before, but when they would roll into town in the south, and they would see the Waffle House, and if they saw the lights on and they had a limited menu, well, okay, that means let's keep going, things aren't too bad right here. As they keep going into town and or closer to the eye of where the storm passed over those, they’ll see. If the Waffle House was not operating, and the lights are out, and it's everything shut down, well, then they knew they had their hands full. So it brings me back to some of those storms that you mentioned and Hurricane Andrew, and even one of my experiences was going through a couple of these storms and the loss of power, you couldn't get a hot shower, you couldn't get a cup of coffee and I remember there was one franchise that was open, and they had customers around the corner down the street, just to try to get some coffee or a hot meal and that franchise made some money while being open and there are people that still remember that and then become loyal to that brand. So there is an incentive just for your business to be open and what a great thing to have, is to have something open when you hit with these storms. So seeing the devastation, living through some of it really kind of helped put the why in what I do.

Griffin Hamilton  

I love that and again, me being from Florida, my folks are in the panhandle and recently Panama City Beach, Mexico beach, I mean, those have still yet to recover and it's just amazing to see the impact that a couple hours of a storm could have and so it shouldn't be a topic taken lightly by any means, doing these little things as we continue to preach on the show, being proactive, have these preventative maintenance tasks performed on a regular basis just preparing for something you wouldn't expect and that's really what makes someone excel in this world, but again, Chuck, certainly appreciate you taking the time to come on. It's been an absolute pleasure and look forward to staying in touch.

Chuck Miccolis

Me too. That was great Griffin, thank you very much for the opportunity to be with you today.

Outro:

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