ATLANTA and HARRISBURG, Pa. -

A bomb scare. A hurricane taking an unusual route and barreling toward the Northeast. Historic flooding. A fatal accident.

Rare as these events may be, they all have impacted U.S. auctions in the past year.

While disasters, accidents and criminal activity can be equally scary and unpredictable, auctions typically have procedures in place to prepare for and counter these emergencies should they arise.

Auto Remarketing reached out to a variety of independent auction groups, corporate auction companies and individual facilities for input on how they respond and prepare for emergencies. 

While others declined comment, Manheim director of corporate security David Reeder shared the perspective of a large corporation, and Harrisburg Auto Auction owner Lynn Weaver offered the viewpoint from the independent side.

Steps to Take

First things first, Weaver told Auto Remarketing, identify the emergency. And in doing so, communication is key.

For instance, on sale days at the Pennsylvania auction, everyone in internal security and management at Harrisburg AA has cell phones and walkie-talkies.

There are a large number of company cell phones, and each one has 911 pre-programmed, Weaver emphasized.

“They are instructed to assess a situation as quickly as they can. Their first call should be to 911, if necessary. The second call should be to management,” he noted. If the situation is assessed as not critical, the first call should be to management, Weaver added.

Granted, some emergencies are more easily predicted than others. Thanks to today’s 24-7 weather information sources and constant storm-path updates, Weaver has found it’s somewhat easier to adapt to natural disasters ahead of time.

“Right now, national disasters are a little easier to prepare for, because the weather services have gotten so good,” he shared. “Usually, you can plan a little while ahead. Whether or not people react properly is another question.”

Preparation

One of the main catalysts that changed how businesses in general reacted and prepared for emergencies, particularly natural disasters, was Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The security team for Cox Enterprises, Manheim’s parent company, started by stressing “business continuity planning” following Katrina’s devastation, said Reeder.

In essence, this was designed to give instruction on how to respond to various emergencies, ranging from hurricanes to bomb threats to missing items.

“What it encompasses is almost a checklist,” Reeder explained. “There are meetings between the senior management teams. They actually go through a table-top exercise for any number of different (situations).

“The Cox team would pick whatever the topic is and then do a table-top on how the incident occurs,” he added.

Reeder went on to note that each of the Manheim auctions then has their own security. The auction’s security team then collaborates with the facility’s senior management to adjust the template so that it meets the specific needs of that particular auction.

Just like each auction may have its own needs, each emergency may require different steps. Echoing what Weaver alluded to, Reeder said this is where communication comes into play.

“In security, most of our incident responses center around police. Or it could be a medical (response) if someone gets injured,” he noted. “Really, our thing is to notify the right people as quickly as possible because we rely mostly on law enforcement and then emergency services for medical (emergencies).”

Reeder added: “It really covers the gamut from weather emergencies to medical emergencies to fires to even when people enter a lot illegally at night. All of that stuff is created into a checklist, so that people can react quickly to whatever event occurs.”

Over at Harrisburg — which is in an area of the U.S. where snowfall can be a major problem — the auction has “Operation Snowflake.” Basically, this document is a few pages of simple instruction detailing what needs to be done and who is responsible for completing certain tasks in the event of heavy snow. It also shares how the auction’s staff can find out if the facility is closed.

Harrisburg AA has 20 to 25 employees at two different sites who have to be there once the snow stops, even if it means staying the night, Weaver explained.

This is designed so that the auction can get the lot ready. The auction also has an outside vendor to remove snow.

With flooding, the auction has a plan in which the lot management team moves everything to higher ground out.

Of course, in the wake of last year’s flood, Harrisburg AA had to redefine its meaning of “higher ground.”

Granted, for some of the more extreme disasters like a fire or an earthquake, it’s a bit trickier to plan.

That said, the auction’s computers have back-up systems, and there is off-site storage for company records. Those are maintained daily, so that once facilities are ready to go, the auction is ready electronically.

Weaver acknowledged that “It’s always a moving target on facilities, depending on the damage,” but emphasized the priority of getting the computers running.

Employee Training

Of course, to make sure that employees and the leaders at facilities are up to speed, training for such events is paramount. At Harrisburg AA, the auction has a weekly managers meeting, and once a year, the topic of the meeting will be natural disaster planning.

At this meeting, people contribute their ideas and the team reviews the plan, designed to be a brief two-page document. This plan aims to ensure that, in the event of a natural disaster, the auction has backed up computer and accounting files, taken care of banking needs, protected titles and other tasks of that nature.

As for things like personal injury, Weaver said there is employee training and it is discussed more often.

Over at Manheim, Reeder says things can vary from auction to auction. Based on the facility’s size, it may be a matter of the auction security staff doing the drill once a quarter or once a year.

The corporate offices usually conduct fire evacuations once a year, he said.

“The auctions do variations of it,” Reeder explained. “Because their obviously not going to do a drill on a sale day. They’ll probably do a mock drill when just the employees are there.”

Out of the Blue

Like Hurricane Irene’s trek up the East Coast through New England proved this summer, sometimes emergencies can be out of the ordinary.

For instance, the Northeast typically doesn’t typically face the same threat of hurricanes as the Gulf Coast, just as the Southeast doesn’t usually face the same threat of a major snowstorm as the Midwest.

Nonetheless, those kinds of emergencies happen, no matter how rare. And auctions have to be ready for whatever may come their way, expected or otherwise.

“It’s all centered around business continuity,” Reeder said. “With those events — like the hurricanes — it’s really the senior management team knowing what resources are available.

“Actually, what’s interesting is that during the hurricane — specifically that last one —Cox and Manheim worked together,” he added, noting some properties Cox has in the Northeast.

“So, all the different divisions worked with Cox, who had pre-staged locations for fuel,” Reeder continued. Cox bought fuel ahead of time, sent chainsaws to the region and had temporary man power.

Additionally, the company had a security vendor on stand-by to help out as well.

“At the senior levels, they do a lot of the BCP, what we call training,” Reeder said, referring to business continuity planning.

“And then we just dust off the plan when the hurricane is coming. Then we just execute. But we really execute as an identity. Something like that is not just a Manheim event,” he added.

Just as Manheim and Cox were dealing with the impact from atypical hurricanes in the Northeast this summer, Weaver was feeling the impact of unprecedented flooding.

“We knew it was coming and we still weren’t prepared for it. It was worse than anything we had ever had here. It was something we didn’t imagine,” he said. “Now that we’ve experienced that, we’re one step more aware than we were before, and we will be more prepared in the future.”

Weaver went on to note that the hurricanes that his region this year “raised the bar way up.”

He emphasized that weather services can be quite helpful, but they can’t necessarily predict the full severity of a situation.

When flooding hit Harrisburg this summer, the water rose above main driveway at the auction and “it’s never been that high before,” Weaver said.

“Now we have a new norm. Our high ground is marked differently and we prepare for that much differently,” he noted.

“You learn something every storm and every natural disaster. We take that and plug it into our plan,” Weaver continued. “The scary ones are the ones you can’t plan for.”