For brokers and insurers with operations in Boston, guaranteeing employee safety became paramount after bombings during the final stages of the Boston Marathon caused mayhem in the city.

“We shut down our office about an hour after we heard the news,” said Philip J. Edmundson, president and CEO of Boston-based William Gallagher Associates Insurance Brokers Inc., which is headquartered about one mile from the site of the bombings.

“Our first priority was the safety of our employees,” he said. “We did have three employees running in the race, so after their safety was secured we focused on clients.”

Mr. Edmundson said that the post-traumatic stress arising from the attack cannot be ignored.

“In our message to our clients, we are emphasizing the importance of employee assistance programs to address trauma-related stress,” he said.

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Liberty Mutual Insurance Group's emergency response team was activated immediately after the bombings on Monday afternoon, said a spokeswoman for the Boston-based insurer in an email.

“Employee safety is always our first priority — both determining their status and offering access to counseling and other services through the company's employee assistance program,” she said.

Liberty Mutual's Boston offices were closed Monday in recognition of the Patriot's Day holiday, which greatly diminished the insurer's employee presence in the area. Patriot's Day is celebrated the third Monday in April in Massachusetts and Maine to commemorate the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord during the Revolutionary War.

“A few of our employees were in the vicinity of the blasts and were injured, but none seriously,” she said. “In addition, we have been following emergency response instructions from the city, state and law enforcement agencies.”

A building that Liberty Mutual leases on Berkeley Street, Boston, remained closed Tuesday due the bombing.

Offices for the Workers' Compensation Rating and Inspection Bureau of Massachusetts are about one mile from the race site, said Paul Meagher, president of the bureau in Boston.

“We closed early to make sure employees could get home on time because public transportation was impacted,” he said, “We generally close at five and we closed about a quarter to four. It was a little stressful, but people were able to get home.”

He noted that about 99% of the bureau's employees take public transportation to work.

“There was so much going on we wanted to err on the side of caution rather than find out later that we should have let people go home earlier,” Mr. Meagher said.

“Fortunately, all of our team members were accounted for and we were able to evacuate the building safely,” said a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo Insurance Services Inc. in San Francisco. The broker's Boston office is near the site of the attack.

There was “no known impact to our colleagues” in the Boston office, said a spokeswoman for Marsh Inc. in New York.