Lance Ewing is executive vice president of global risk management and client services at Cotton Holdings Inc., a Katy, Texas-based infrastructure support and disaster recovery firm. A former president of the Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc. and a former Risk Manager of the Year, Mr. Ewing recently has been involved in providing recovery and remediation services to organizations in Mexico, Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico after the series of catastrophes that struck over the past two months. He spoke with Business Insurance Editor Gavin Souter about his experiences and lessons learned by risk managers who suffered losses from the recent hurricanes. Edited excerpts follow.

Q: What was your experience with Hurricane Harvey in Texas?

A: Harvey decided to come ashore in Corpus Christi and the surrounding areas, and those areas took a fairly hard direct hit. There was some warning, so organizations were able to prepare for the storm, but there was a lot of damage from wind. There was a fair amount of roof damage, you had buildings collapsing inward and damage from wind-driven rain. You also had power outages, so that began the lifting and shifting of emergency generators to that area. Then Harvey headed north, and while the wind aspect of the storm had dissipated to some degree, the torrential rain led to some of the most horrific flooding I’ve ever seen.

Q: How well prepared were commercial entities?

A: Many risk managers in the Texas area were fairly well prepared, from what I saw, and had realistic expectations. There were some exceptions — some wanted an immediate response and an adjuster or remediation company on-site without taking into consideration the amount of resources that had been sent to the Corpus area and then had to be brought back to the Houston area. But you have a lot of manufacturing and energy companies in the area, and they are used to dealing with this type of situation, and I think larger corporations invoked their business continuity plans as quickly as they possibly could.

Q: What about Hurricane Irma? How were the preparation and response there?

A: Irma was a bit different. Irma came through and did damage in the Caribbean area, and then she had a lift and a shift. So while it was expected to hit the Atlantic coast, it went up the Gulf coast of Florida instead. There was some ill-preparedness on the west coast on behalf of some commercial risk managers. In some cases, they weren’t really ready, and a lot of resources had gone to Texas, so finding things like emergency generators, sandbags and people to help clean up quickly was difficult. There was a nursing home that waited until the end of the week before looking for transportation to relocate their folks. That’s a situation where you shouldn’t wait until Thursday or Friday when the storm is coming in on Sunday.

Q: Hurricane Maria then caused significant problems in Puerto Rico. What issues did your firm deal with there?

A: The preparedness may not have been what it could have been. There were no laborers because the workers could not leave their homes. You could not dock big ships because the storm had done so much damage to the dock area. There was no drinking water, no fuel and no electricity. Major clients can implement their business continuity plans, but you also need a Plan B.

Q: What are the key lessons to be learned from the storms?

A: The No. 1 takeaway is: Have a robust risk management business continuity plan. You can’t be looking for sandbags while the storm is less than four hours away.

The second takeaway is that you can’t always believe the modeling and the FEMA mapping. Look at Houston — the storm didn’t fit the model or the mapping. Look at where your operations are located geographically; examine what’s the worst-case scenario and what’s your resiliency if it happens.

The third takeaway is that you have to have patience. It’s going to take time for your remediation company to respond, it’s going to take some time to get advances from your insurance carrier, it’s going to take some time for adjusters to arrive. You may be on your own for a period of time, and there may be some self-resiliency issues that corporations are going to have to look at.