By Stanley Turkel, CMHS, ISHC
December 6, 2012
1. Superstorm Sandy
Storms Into the Northeast
After Superstorm Sandy delivered a knockout punch to New
Jersey, New York and Long Island, dozens of hotels and thousands of
residents
are assessing the severe damage.
Since I
have lived in Queens in the same house for more than 40 years where
Rima and I
raised four children, we received many personal inquiries about our
condition.
I am pleased to report that
we suffered no power outrage and, except for some broken tree branches,
no
physical damage.
How lucky can you
get?!
But in the past five years our
Queens location has been victim to more hurricanes, noreasters,
earthquakes and
tornadoes than in the previous thirty-five years.
It
seems clear that a drastic climate change
is taking place.
I want to share with you a realistic and honest assessment
of possible solutions which appeared in the
New
Yorker magazine in the December 3, 2012 issue:
2. Disaster Economics
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On February 1, 1953, a
fierce, sustained storm created a
huge surge in the North Sea off the coast of Holland.
Floodwaters overtopped the dikes, swallowing
half a million acres of land and killing nearly two thousand people. Within weeks of the storm, a government
commission issued what came to be known as the Delta Plan, a set of
recommendations for flood-control measures.
Over the next four decades, the Dutch invested
billions of guilders in a
vast set of dams and barriers, culminating in the construction of the
Maeslant
Barrier, an enormous movable seawall to protect the port of Rotterdam. Since the Delta Plan went into effect, the
Netherlands has not been flooded by the sea again.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which brought havoc to
the Northeast and inflicted tens of billions of dollars in damage, it's
overwhelmingly clear that parts of the U.S. need a Delta Plan of their
own. Sandy was not an isolated incident:
only last year, Hurricane Irene caused nearly sixteen billion dollars
in damage,
and there is a growing consensus that extreme weather events are
becoming more
common and more damaging. The annual
cost of natural disasters in the U.S. has doubled over the past two
decades. Instead of just cleaning up
after disasters hit, we would be wise to follow the Dutch, and take
steps to
make them less destructive in the first place.
There is no dearth of promising ideas out there, such as
building a seawall beyond the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (the Dutch
engineering
firm Arcadis has proposed a movable barrier, like the Rotterdam one),
burying
power lines in vulnerable areas, and
elevating buildings and subway entrances.
The question is whether we can find the political
will to invest in such
ideas. Although New York politicians
like the City Council Speaker, Christine Quinn, and Governor Andrew
Cuomo have
called for major new investment in disaster prevention, reports from
Washington
suggest that Congress will be more willing to spend money on relief
than on
preparedness. That's what history would
lead you to expect: for the most part, the U.S. has shown a marked bias
toward
relieving victims of disaster, while underinvesting in prevention. A study by the economist Andrew Healy and the
political scientist Neil Malhotra showed that, between 1985 and 2004,
the
government spent annually, on average, fifteen times as much on
disaster relief
as on preparedness.
Politically speaking,
it's always easier to shell out money
for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable
victims,
than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may
not happen
in the future. Healy and Malhotra found
that voters reward politicians for spending money on post-disaster
cleanup, but
not for investing in disaster prevention, and it's only natural that
politicians respond to this incentive. The federal system
complicates matters, too: local governments
want decision-making authority, but major disaster- prevention projects
are
bound to require federal money. And much
crucial infrastructure in the U.S. is owned by the private sector, not
the
government, which makes it harder to do something like bury power lines.
These are genuine hurdles, and safeguarding the great
expanse of the Atlantic coast is a much more expensive proposition than
defending Holland's smaller one. But
there's
a more basic problem: the U.S., as a rule, tends to underinvest in
public
infrastructure. We've been skimping on
maintenance of roads and bridges for decades.
In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers
gave our infrastructure
a D grade, and estimated that we'd need $2.2 trillion to bring it up to
snuff. Our power grid is, by the
standards of the developed world, shockingly unreliable.
A study by three Carnegie Mellon professors
in 2006 found that average annual power outages in the U.S. last four
times as
long as those in France and seven times as long as those in the
Netherlands.
(The past two years' data would likely be even worse.)
This isn't because of lack of resources ̶ the U.S. is the world's biggest
economy. But, though we may have the
coolest twenty-first century technology in our homes, we're stuck with
mid-twentieth century roads and wires.
Meaningful
disaster-prevention measures will certainly be
expensive: estimate for a New York seawall range from ten to twenty
billion dollars. That may seem
unreasonable at a time when
Washington is obsessed with cutting the federal deficit.
Yet inaction can be even more expensive ̶ after Katrina, the government had to spend
more than a hundred billion dollars on relief and reconstruction ̶ and there are good reasons to believe that
disaster-control measures could save money in the long run. The A.S.C.E. estimates that federal spending
on levees pays for itself six times over, and studies of other
flood-control
measures in the developed world find benefit-to-cost ratios of three or
four to
one. The value for money is even higher
on poor countries, where floods obliterate weak infrastructures. And a 2005 independent study of
disaster-mitigation grants made by FEMA found that every dollar in
grants ended
up saving taxpayers $3.65 in avoided costs.
The size of our current deficit does not change this
calculus. In fact, there's never been a
better time for a Delta Plan in the U.S.
With interest
rates so low, it's cheap to borrow money, and there are
plenty of unemployed workers and unused resources that can be put to
work. In a time of austerity, there's
bound to be
opposition to expensive infrastructure projects. But
if the government ̶ and, by extension,
tax-payers ̶ is already on the hook for
all the damage
caused when disasters strike, we owe it to ourselves to do something
about how
much those disasters cost.
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3. Hotel History: The Hotel Jerome (1889), Aspen, Colorado
The Hotel Jerome was built in 1889 by Jerome B. Wheeler,
co-owner of Macy's Department Store.
He
visited Aspen in 1883 and, impressed by its beauty, began investing in
the
community.
He commissioned the hotel and
the Wheeler Opera House.
The Hotel
Jerome was the first hotel in Colorado with electricity and indoor
plumbing.
After surviving the Panic of 1893, the Jerome passed through some
trying times
and a variety of different owners.
In
1911, Mansor Elisha, a Syrian American drummer with a travelling band,
acquired
the hotel and owned it through a flu epidemic when its parlors served
as a
morgue.
Elisha's ownership survived the
Prohibition when the most popular drink was the Aspen Crud, a vanilla
ice cream
soda or milkshake spiked with bourbon.
The Elisha family continued to own and operate the Jerome
through World War II.
Earlier, U.S.
Olympic bobsledder, Billy Fiske saw the perfect terrain for a ski
resort and
formed the Highland Bavarian ski club.
After WWII, some veterans of the U.S. Army's Tenth
Mountain Division's
"soldiers on skis" returned to Aspen to help develop the ski
resort.
After construction of a new
swimming pool, the Jerome attracted many movie stars including Gary
Cooper,
Lana Turner and John Wayne.
In 1945, Walter Paepcke, president of the Container
Corporation of America, envisioned Aspen as an ideal location for an
American
counterpart to the Salzburg Festival.
Paepcke acquired and/or leased many buildings including
the Hotel
Jerome.
With Friedl Pfeifer, an
Austrian, Paepcke invested in the Aspen Skiing Company and completed
Ski Lift
No. 1, which claimed to be the longest in the world.
Paepcke created the Aspen Institute as an ideal gathering
place for thinkers, leaders, artists and musicians from all over the
world.
His participation in the Great
Books seminar, led by philosopher Mortimer Adler, inspired the
Institute's
Executive Seminar.
The Aspen Institute
continues to be one of the greatest intellectual and music venues in
the world.
After a variety of investors and owners, the Hotel Jerome
suffered some down periods of neglect and subsequent restoration
projects.
In 1998, the J ̶ Bar was
restored to its
original appearance and four years later, a $6 million project added a
new rear
wing and grand ballroom and updated the guest rooms.
The Hotel Jerome is now on the National Register of Historic
Places. Each beautifully appointed guestroom is spacious ̶ even the
smallest is
more than 500 square feet.
Bathrooms,
finished with white marble and octagonal tiles, have oversized tubs and
separate showers.
The Hotel Jerome is part of the Auberge Resort
collection.
The Garden Terrace
Restaurant serves Alpine Colorado cuisine.
The Library serves tapas ̶ style dishes while the J ̶ Bar
continues to
feature the hotel's signature drink, the Aspen Crud.
The 93 ̶ room Hotel Jerome was recognized as
one of Travel Advisor Readers 2011 "Top 10 Hotels in the World."
4. Litigation
Support Services
Since 1992, I have provided litigation support services to
attorneys specializing in hotel-related litigation and have served as
an expert
consultant and/or witness in 35 cases over the past 20 years.
My extensive hotel operating experience enables me to
provide objective opinions to attorneys who are litigating cases that
involve:
- Hurricane damage and/or business interruption cases
- Franchisee/franchisor disputes
- Management contract disagreements
- Wrongful deaths
- Fire and other catastrophes
- Slip and fall accidents
Since more than 65% of hotels are franchised, a hotel expert
should be thoroughly familiar with franchise license agreements and
franchise
disclosure documents.
I am one of the
most widely-published hotel consultants in the United States with more
than
half of my 250 published articles dealing with franchising.
I've also written and published two hotel
books: "Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry" and
"Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels in New York" (which the New York
Times called "passionate and informative").
A knowledgeable hotel expert can provide thorough research,
expert report writing, thoughtful testimony and indispensable
litigation
support assistance.
5. Quote of The Month
"The public and private edifices that were founded for
eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty
giant;
and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have
survived
the injuries of time and fortune."
Edward Gibbon
"The
Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire"
