* Companies relying on temporary offices, workers at home
* Electrical infrastructure coming out of the basement
By Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK, Nov 18 (Reuters) – Few thought it would take
quite so long to fully restore the dimmed lights of the famed
skyline of New York City’s Financial District.
At last, however, firms displaced by the flooding and power
outages brought on by Superstorm Sandy seem ready to return
downtown, if a little warier of the rivers and sea that
surrounds them.
Water Street was more water than street when Sandy hit.
Nearly three weeks later, many of the flooded office towers that
line the street as it skirts the East River toward the harbor at
Manhattan’s southernmost tip remain closed.
Yellow caution tape still decks the doors to darkened, mucky
lobbies. The usual crowds of suited office workers have vanished
from the sidewalks, replaced by a handful of clean-up workers
and security officers.
“It’s definitely a hiccup in our revenue and a disruption of
our ongoing business operations,” said Lou Colasuonno, a senior
managing director of FTI Strategic Communications, a PR firm
specializing in crisis management.
He and about 90 other employees who usually work in a
building near Water Street have had to decamp to another office
owned by the firm in Midtown Manhattan. Many displaced firms
have improvised in similar ways, by dispersing employees to
other premises, renting temporary office space and encouraging
employees to work remotely with their laptops and cellphones.
Despite the squeeze, Colasuonno said he was making the most
of seeing colleagues he might normally only email. Echoing
others, he also pointed out that the Financial District
weathered a far graver disaster in the 2001 World Trade Center
attacks.
“It’s going to take more than a couple of feet of water to
chase New Yorkers out of Manhattan,” Colasuonno said of the
record-breaking surges caused by Sandy.
A number of Wall Street institutions, including the New York
Stock Exchange and some major banking firms, were able to resume
business as soon as power was restored after the Oct. 29 storm.
But many buildings in low-lying areas suffered
longer-lasting damage to electrical and heating infrastructure.
A report earlier this week from commercial real estate firm
Jones Lang LaSalle showed about 30 percent of the area’s
rentable office space still was closed because of the storm.
CUSTOMERS GONE
As more buildings come back to life each day, the majority
of displaced businesses were expecting to return home before
November was out, although employees of the New York Daily News,
based in one of the last buildings before Manhattan gives way to
the sea, have been warned it may be nearly a year before they
can return to their old newsroom.
John Wheeler, who heads the Jones Lang LaSalle’s Lower
Manhattan office, said there was little sign that businesses
that got soaked would consider moving up Manhattan or elsewhere
to higher ground.
“The attributes that lead to Lower Manhattan’s resurgence
are intact,” he said, referring to office space that was on
average around $20 to $25 cheaper per square foot compared to
Midtown Manhattan.
In what is increasingly looking like a design flaw to some,
electrical infrastructure and other things that should never get
wet are commonly installed in building’s basements. It’s an
issue several downtown landlords are planning to address,
Wheeler said.
“When you’re touring tenants in the future, this question
could well be asked, and you’ll want to be able to say, ‘Oh,
yes, we’re doing x, y, z to avoid an outage,'” he said.
“Everybody recognizes this is a freak occurrence,” said
Andrew Willis, a spokesman for Brookfield Asset Management, a
building management company that was able to reopen five of its
six downtown office buildings within a week of the storm. “Our
tenants have maintained their faith in lower Manhattan.”
Still, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has said that 100-year
storms seem to be turning into more regular events.
“Now what we’re doing is assuming we will get flooded,” Bob
Benmosche, the CEO of insurance firm AIG, said in an interview.
The firm’s headquarters in the Financial District has been
closed since the storm, but was expected to reopen to employees
on Nov. 19.
“We are moving our phone switches and other electrical
switches from the basement to the second floor so that we’re
well above any floodplain whatsoever,” Benmosche said, adding
that they are also looking to see where in their building they
might store emergency generator fuel.
In the end, it may be that the neighborhood food carts and
washed-out cafes that cook office workers’ lunches and who
cannot work remotely will have endured the heaviest blow.
Standing by his hot dog cart, Marino Mastoras was one of the
few signs of life at a Water Street intersection, which has been
his home base for more than two decades. His earnings have been
halved, and he is desperate for his customers to return.
“After that happened, all my steady customers are out, only
construction people come,” he said. Shifting his cart elsewhere
was more complicated than it might sound, he said, and besides,
there was a principle at stake: “People know I’m here. That’s
very important to me.”
(Additional reporting by Clare Baldwin; Editing by Paul
Thomasch and Bill Trott)
