Their respiratory and DME store in 2005 withstood one of the most powerful hurricanes in Florida history and continued to prosper despite the disaster, only to go up in smoke less than a month later when the owner of the dry cleaning establishment next door—recently arrested by police on charges of arson—allegedly torched his own shop for the insurance money.

Meet the McCarthys: John and June, husband-and-wife owners of Affordable Medical Supply in Tamarac, Fla, a small community located a stone’s throw from bustling Fort Lauderdale on the Sunshine State’s eastern coastline. They are determined to keep alive what remains of their business, a feat that is being greatly complicated due to the inadequacy of the fire-protection policy they took out some time back to cover them against just such an occurrence.

Thriving Enterprise
Before the fire, Affordable Medical Supply was an attractive store operating out of a well-situated retail strip mall. Customers entering the 3,500-square-foot shop were greeted by an impressive display of lift chairs—as many as a dozen and a half of them, arranged in three half-circle rows. To the left, along one wall, was a collection of power wheelchairs and other mobility products, flanked on either side by manual wheelchairs and scooters. Much of the smaller merchandise—medical supplies and instruments, for instance—were displayed on wheeled fixtures that could be rolled into different positions as desired to change the look and feel of the store.

One aspect of the store that never changed was its home-like ambiance, achieved by use of trendy color schemes (greens and wood tones) along with the judicious deployment of upscale furnishings, lamps, wall treatments, and potted trees. Los Angeles-based consultant Jack Evans helped them come up with this design concept. “Jack felt it would be bad for business to have a sterile, institutional environment, and we could not have agreed with him more,” says John, who got his start in home care when he was only 19 (he is 53 now).

The first store John owned went by the name of Doctors’ Respiratory Co, and it opened just a few blocks from where Affordable Medical Supply stood (until recently). The core business of Doctors’ Respiratory was oxygen, with some DME tossed into the mix. The name changed to Affordable Medical Supply in 1990 to more accurately reflect the fact that DME/HME had grown to become a major part of the business.

Over the years, the thriving enterprise found it necessary to relocate five times, on each occasion stepping up to larger facilities to accommodate more product, but always remaining within the same part of Tamarac.

Almost Gone With The Wind
Despite industry-wide gloom over national competitive bidding and other business-dampening developments, the McCarthys were particularly excited about Affordable Medical Supply’s own prospects as they looked ahead to 2006. In October, they went to the Medtrade show with the expectation of buying big and having the store fully stocked for the new year.

Then came the first blow, literally. The couple had barely arrived in Atlanta and unpacked their suitcases at the hotel when word from home reached them that Tamarac was in line to be hit by a fast-moving, late-season hurricane brewing off Florida’s western shoreline. Although John and June planned to spend a full week in Atlanta, capping their stay with a few days of much-deserved vacation fun, they cut their Medtrade visit short to hurry back to the store and prepare for the storm—Hurricane Wilma.

In addition to readying the shop itself to withstand the driving winds and torrential rains of Wilma, the McCarthys and their devoted staff toiled furiously to arrange rush deliveries of extra oxygen and other medical supplies to customers they might not be able to reach for days after the storm, depending on how hard it hit. “We started the process of getting everything we needed from our distributors and then routing the drivers even before we arrived back home,” says June. “And we gave our drivers instructions to make sure each of our customers had sufficient bottled water, batteries, canned food, and other emergency items on hand.”
Adds John, “We ended up giving away flashlights because some of our customers who were relatively new to Florida and had never before gone through a hurricane did not know what to expect, and so were not adequately prepared.”

As it turned out, the McCarthys themselves were not adequately prepared. “Nobody was,” says June. “We had taken all the right steps—stocked up on gasoline to operate our vehicles and run the emergency generators, put up the storm shutters, and so forth. But the force of this hurricane caught everybody by surprise. Usually, when a hurricane comes in from the west, it has to travel over land quite a distance, and by the time it reaches us, it has lost most of its punch. Not this time.”

As Wilma roared through, it completely knocked out the electricity in a three-county region (blackout conditions lasted for 3 weeks afterward). Felled trees lay everywhere, making many roads hazardous to drive (a condition made worse at night by the fact that street lamps and traffic lights no longer were operating).

Call Them Old-Fashioned
Within a day of Wilma’s departure, the scale of devastation became evident. The McCarthys quickly realized that the many oxygen H-tanks they earlier delivered would be used up long before Tamarac could dig out and return to anything remotely resembling normality. “There was an immediate shortage of gasoline,” says June. “We were in a panic trying to figure out how we were going to obtain the gas to operate our vehicles and make deliveries, assuming we could even get resupplied with oxygen and other products in the first place.”

They solved both problems by syphoning whatever gas remained in their fleet of vehicles and used those amounts to fill the tanks of just two trucks, which they then drove out beyond the disaster zone to where gasoline and inventory replenishment were readily available. “One truck came back loaded with refilled oxygen tanks and the other with as much spare gasoline in five-gallon containers as it could carry,” says John.

Affordable Medical Supply could continue serving customers in the wake of Wilma in part because the store—and its operations nerve center—was undamaged. However, even if the store had been wrecked, the McCarthys and their staff still would have found a way to keep helping, such is the stuff of which they are made. “It’s just part of who we are,” says June. “We are deep into patient care. Call us old-fashioned or Polly-annaish, but we believe that when people need help, someone’s got to be there to offer care.”

Eventually, life resumed its regular rhythms in Tamarac, and the McCarthys breathed a sigh of relief. But their happiness over surviving Wilma turned to sorrow less than a month later when fire gutted the store.

Rude Awakening
The fire started sometime after midnight on the morning of November 27, 2005. The McCarthys were jolted awake at about 3:00 am by a call from their security service to alert them that something was wrong. “The store’s motion detectors had gone off, and the operator wanted to know if the police should be summoned,” recalls John. “I thought it might be another false alarm—the air conditioner kicking on to cause a wall poster to ruffle, and that is enough movement to be picked up by the motion detectors. Or, maybe, it was an ornament that had fallen off the Christmas tree we had just finished putting up and decorating the day before.”

To play it safe, John directed the operator to send a patrol car to have a look around. A few minutes later, the security service called back to announce the police had discovered a fire at the adjacent dry cleaner. The motion detectors were tripped not by a falling ornament but by the explosive shattering of Affordable Medical Supply’s windows from the exceptionally intense heat of the fire next door.

It took eight of Tamarac’s nine hook-and-ladder teams 2 hours to beat back the flames. Meanwhile, John and June gazed on in horror at the fiery destruction.

Initially, officials thought they had been dealing with a fire caused by an electrical short. Before long, though, during mop-up operations, investigators on the scene noticed the burn pattern looked more like what they usually find in cases involving arson. “All we knew at the time was that it was a very hot fire,” says John. “It melted the roof, and we lost the entire back room and repair center.” Says June, “It could have been worse if the fire had not been put out before it reached the area where we kept our oxygen tanks.”

Actually, it was worse. All of the DME/HME products within were badly damaged from the heat, smoke, and water. “A lot of it was the brand-new inventory we had ordered at Medtrade,” she says. “It arrived during the time when we were without electricity because of Wilma, so we had most of it stacked high, still in their shipping cartons, up against the wall in the back where the fire broke through. We thought maybe we could salvage at least some of what was there. But it turned out to be a total loss.”

The grieving McCarthys refused to throw up their hands and walk away from their ruined business. “We are not quitters,” says John. “Our friend Jack Evans was there for us with encouragement and advice. And it did not take us long before we decided that we were going to come back from this, bigger and better than ever. We tried to get our business operations up again as quickly as we could, because there were so many people depending on us for service that we could not just close. Our thinking was, we have to pull together and get back into business.”

However, all the optimism in the world could not possibly have prepared the pair for the ordeals that next lay in front of them.

The first hurdle emerged while trying to secure a temporary new home for Affordable Medical Supply. “We needed to rent a couple of storage units to stick all the damaged goods in for the insurance adjusters, and an office to run the business from,” says June.

However, suitable office space proved difficult to find. And, when at last they latched onto a property, the landlord forced them to sign a 1-year lease, even though they would not be needing the space for more than a few months (Affordable Medical Supply plans to return to its former location—and take over the space occupied by the dry cleaner to boot—sometime later this year after reconstruction of the building is completed).

Communications were another problem. The multi-line phone trunk that connected the store to its customers fried in the fire, so the McCarthys had to make do with a single residential line at their home, and the cell phones in their pockets. “My wireless bill alone the first month was over $4,000,” John reveals.

Insurance: the good and the bad
The McCarthys had coverage against fire, but the policy’s protections were inadequate. Things started going downhill with the first phone call to the insurance company when the customer service representative directed June to get in touch with a disaster-recovery outfit. She did, and soon came to regret that she had. “The recovery people arrived quickly and then, inexplicably, spent countless hours trying to clean up inventory that was ruined and tidying up what was left of a store that had no usable roof,” she marvels. “I kept asking them why there were going to all this effort when it was plainly futile, and what was all this going to cost, but they never gave me a straight answer.”

Only after the disaster-recovery crew packed up and left did the McCarthys learn that payment for services rendered—$43,000 total—would be deducted from the content coverage reimbursement owed to the couple, reimbursement that would barely have compensated for their inventory losses as it was.

The McCarthys did, however, find a silver lining to their insurance woes. First, they were delighted to discover their policy included a rider to pay the replacement cost of computers they lost in the tragedy and also to pay the cost of recovering or reentering data. Second, and even better, the policy included a provision to pay the cost of overhead above and beyond what they had been shelling out monthly to run their business, prefire: thus, all the extra money they are compelled right now to spend on temporary offices and storage space, additional employees to aid in the rebuilding of the business, even marketing campaigns to win back old customers (and new ones as well) will be fully reimbursed (after, of course, the requisite reams of paperwork and supporting documentation are completed and submitted). This feature of the policy is called uninterruptible insurance (also known as business interruption insurance). Unfortunately, it is a feature that will cease 12 months to the day after the fire occurred. And, alas, the McCarthys do not expect their abnormal overhead to be finished ratcheting back down by then. “There will be some period of months where we will be paying for the higher overhead entirely out of our own pocket,” says June.

Asked what in retrospect they might have done differently with regard to their insurance situation, John replies that he would have doubled or even tripled the amount of coverage purchased. June, however, says that while she might not have opted to increase the dollar size of the policy, she absolutely would have insisted it include a rider to cover the cost of a disaster-recovery company’s work, independent of the content coverage payout. “I would also have made sure that it had a rider on top of that for betterment and improvement to cover the cost of all the build-outs and improvements we made to our temporary space,” she adds.

The McCarthys may not have the opportunity to go back in time, but they can try to wrest concessions from the insurance company. “We’re continuing to negotiate,” says June. “But what is really upsetting is that, after all this time, we have received little in the way of payout.”

Nevertheless, the couple insists they will not allow this to drive them out of business. “That is simply not going to happen,” June promises. “We are needed in this market. We have customers who have depended on us for decades. We can’t let them down. And we won’t. We are here to stay.” DP

Rich Smith is a contributing writer for Dealer/Provider.