Case Studies

For decades, L’Auberge Chez François has been one of the leading restaurants in the metro Washington, D.C., area. Known for its exceptional French cuisine and impressive service, the restaurant is a longtime favorite of Washingtonians celebrating anniversaries, birthdays or other special occasions.

A magnitude 6.8 earthquake, called Nisqually in seismic circles, rocked Seattle, Washington, in 2001 and severely damaged the Starbucks corporate headquarters building.

Super Typhoon Paka, as the storm came to be called, was a 12-hour session of destruction for the island of Guam. Stirring up winds in excess of 200 miles per hour, the tropical cyclone tossed buildings, planes and ships across the island like discarded toys. Among these was the headquarters of Continental Micronesia, a subsidiary of Continental Airlines. The main offices, the marketing buildings and the planes were damaged by the powerful typhoon.

It was in late November that an arsonist set a devastating fire to a popular Maryland hotel. The hotel, just five miles from Washington, D.C., does the majority of its business during the city’s cherry blossom season. If the season was missed, they would not only lose that year’s tour business, but bookings for the following years were also at risk.

The good news for Micrel Semiconductor Corporation in San Jose, California, was that the testing division caught the error: one of its ion implant machines in the fabrication division was producing defective wafers. The bad news, as it unfolded, was that production of the unusable wafers had been going on for three days.

DiMare is a major grower and packer of fruits and vegetables with facilities throughout the United States. When a transformer explosion occurred at DiMare’s Coachella Valley plant in California four weeks before the start of the fall citrus packing season, the season’s production was in jeopardy.

A fire destroyed a three-story addition to a hotel in El Centro, California. The construction project was framed, with electrical and plumbing fixtures in place, and the roof stacked. The fire also damaged the client’s two adjacent hotel properties.

The Mountain Green Ski & Golf Resort in Killington, Vermont, suffered a devastating fire loss at the end of ski season. The fire began in an underground parking garage, burning so hot that it melted a portion of the structural steel supporting the seven-story condo resort.