Like a lot of buildings in lower Manhattan, Silverstein Properties Inc.'s 600,000-square-foot tower at 120 Wall St. took on significant flooding during Superstorm Sandy on Oct. 29.

But unlike a lot of its financial district neighbors that remain closed to tenants, 120 Wall St. was reopened just two weeks after the storm, thanks in large part to the business continuity plan Silverstein's risk management and information technology departments had spent most of this past summer developing.

The plan wasn't finished when Sandy struck the region in late October, but executives for the New York-based commercial property owner are convinced the work done to update the company's disaster-response and continuity protocols drastically reduced the financial losses it might have incurred under different circumstances.

“Earlier in the year, we had decided that our business continuity program needed dusting off and updating, and that it needed to be more robust,” said Shari Natovitz, Silverstein's vice president of risk management. Ms. Natovitz said the first step the company took in fortifying its continuity planning was to relocate its servers off-site, away from its headquarters at 7 World Trade Center.

“Call it serendipity or call it good planning on the part of our IT and risk management personnel,” she said. “Either way, the result was that the early work that we did on the continuity plan ... served us extremely well.”

Jeremy Moss, Silverstein's vice president of leasing, was crucial to Silverstein's success in managing its day-to-day affairs as an employer and its responsibilities to its tenants, who were displaced from all three of its properties in lower Manhattan as a result of the five-day-long blackout.

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Tenants of 120 Wall St. remained displaced for several more days because of flooding in their building, while tenants at 7 World Trade Center and 120 Broadway were able to return to their offices when power was restored a few days after the storm.

“Our tenants were all looking to us for answers regarding when the building would open, damage sustained during the storm, the status of their personal property, and whether or not we had temporary facilities available,” Mr. Moss said. “If you reopen your building and nobody knows about it, that's not particularly useful.”

Mr. Moss said another key piece of Silverstein's relative success in navigating the storm's effects on the city at large was the command center it established as a centralized source of information and, in many cases, temporary workspace and housing for employees for whom commuting in and out of Manhattan had become logistically challenging.

“For any property owner that's thinking about business continuity, there has to be buy-in at the top. It takes time out of the day and resources away from the core business. It takes money and a clear message from leadership that it's a priority,” Mr. Moss said. “The rewards far outweigh the costs, but the message has to be sent throughout the organization so that it gets the cooperation and support that it needs. We were fortunate to have leadership that did exactly that.”