A 2009 Office Fire Helped Prepare AmeriGas for the COVID-19 Disruption

More than 10 years after a devastating electrical fire severely damaged the multistory headquarters of the AmeriGas Propane company, knocking the structure out of commission for almost 14 months, AmeriGas has been taking the lessons learned from the blaze and using them to find ways to adapt amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The fire, which struck Dec. 16, 2009, at the company’s administrative building in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, caused massive smoke and fire damage that shuttered the structure until repairs and improvements could be completed in February of 2011.

And while the fire taught AmeriGas several lessons about how to improve IT disaster recovery and IT business continuity processes, it has also helped prepare the propane supplier for the global health crisis that is affecting its operations today.

No one was injured in the blaze, which also damaged administrative offices of UGI. After the fire, the companies implemented established disaster recovery plans that had been put in place a few years earlier to prepare for such a disruption.

AmeriGas’s Justine Staub

Justine Staub, director of workforce development for AmeriGas, told Channel Futures that having an established disaster recovery plan in place when the fire struck greatly assisted its eventual recovery. “I was involved from an HR standpoint and worked to get people into their new workspace” after the blaze. “For a crisis of this magnitude, it went very smoothly and our customers never knew there was a problem. The disaster recovery plan was key to keeping things working with no interruption of customer services or employee payroll.”

That incident forced some employees to work from home for a short time, but the company quickly found temporary offices for most workers and had those operations running within a week or two, she said.

“It was one of those things where you never thought it would be used, but boy was it critical,” Staub said of the disaster recovery plans. “We all, or most of us, received new computers because of the smoke damage” within a week or two after getting into the new temporary offices, which were three miles from the company’s building.

In response to the current COVID-19 crisis, AmeriGas corporate employees are using company-issued laptops to do their work remotely from home, said Staub. “Our company is fully enabled to support our customers during this challenging time and we are not expecting any delivery suspensions or supply issues. We are working with our suppliers to ensure continuity of supply and leveraging our proprietary trucking, rail and terminal to compliment this effort.”

Another Amerigas employee, who asked not to be identified, told Channel Futures that before the blaze, the company was just starting to provide laptop computers to its office workers instead of desktop PCs. The move to laptops exclusively came quickly after the fire. Workers were also provided with monitors, docking stations and other needed supplies to do their work from home.

In addition to the temporary offices that were opened, the company was also able to move…

…some workers into a nearby AmeriGas office that had been opened months before as part of a then-new SAP software implementation project, the employee said.

“We had another office down the street and some employees barged in on them,” the employee said. “We all worked together in this small space. Had we not had the SAP project going on we would have been in a lot more trouble.”

The timing of the fire also eased the initial recovery efforts. “It helped because the fire happened just before the Christmas holidays and workers had time off,” the employee said. “When we came back from Christmas, we were back in business.”

One major IT change that also came about due to the fire was that many data center functions were moved off-site due to lessons learned from the incident, the employee said. “The biggest thing that came out of it was moving everyone to a laptop,” which made employees mobile. “Going through the fire is helping in today’s situation with COVID-19.”

Gabriel Consulting Group’s Dan Olds

Dan Olds, an IT analyst with Gabriel Consulting Group, said the moves AmeriGas made after the fire were the reason the company was able to get back into operation quickly and prepared it for any kinds of emergencies in the future.

“AmeriGas quickly jumped into action and provided all employees with laptops, docking stations, monitors, plus VPN connections and training, which allowed them to quickly resume business after their fire,” said Olds. “Every employee now has what they need to do their job from home if it becomes necessary in the future. This is a lesson that other companies should learn from and replicate if they can.”

Gartner’s Roberta Witty

Roberta Witty, an analyst with Gartner, agreed.

“The remote work program AmeriGas implemented after the fire has likely put them in a better position to respond to the coronavirus for those workers that can work from home,” she said. At the same time, not all employees can work from home, so organizations still need to determine how to continue to support their mission-critical business services without the normal complement of the workforce, she added.

Gartner’s David Gregory

David Gregory, another Gartner analyst, said the experiences of AmeriGas can provide great value for other companies facing emergencies. “Time should always be taken to engage with all employees who have responded to the disruption to enable them to share thoughts on what went well and what they would like to do differently on another occasion, said Gregory. “This can also help with employee morale following a situation where they have been asked to work outside their normal comfort zones. Hot and cold debriefs should be part of the stand down procedures and lessons learned and improvement areas should be detailed in management action plans and followed through.”

All of these steps “mean that the organization can truly benefit from the lessons learned in a response and ensure that the organization is better prepared for future disruptions,” said Gregory.