Hurricane Katrina Impact
Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, causing catastrophic damage in Florida and Louisiana. The hurricane was described as a category five hurricane resulting in extensive destruction and over 1200 deaths (Kettl, 2006). Hurricane Katrina also had a significant impact on the country’s economy since it had paralyzed imperative operations such as oil supply, grain exports, and transportation due to the destruction of road networks, particularly the Gulf Coast highway. The catastrophe also affected the forestry industry, with millions of acres of land under forestry destroyed. Of all the sectors that were adversely affected by the catastrophe, the ones that managed to rebound the fastest were educational institutions, restaurants, and nursing care facilities. One of the companies whose operations were adversely affected by Hurricane Katrina was the Golden Corral Franchise (Burton & Hicks, 2005).
Golden Corral can be described as a restaurant chain that provides customers hot and cold food varieties in the style of a family buffet. The company has been in operation for forty years, with over four hundred stores across the country. The company, being a restaurant, had its premises adversely damaged by the hurricane. The city of Kenner was vacated by the dwellers who sought refuge in safer areas leaving the company with no labor force or market to sell its products to. Golden Corral thus lost millions due to lack of supplies as the supply chain had been paralyzed by the interrupted transport and communication network (Burton & Hicks, 2005).
It was difficult to reinstate the company back into its initial position since it took some time for the customers to return back to their homes, and the company’s employees did not have homes to go to. According to the company’s director of operations, Malcolm Clark, “there were very few residents in the city and out of the seventy employees that the company sustained, only nine were in the city to carry out operations at the restaurant.” Other than the destruction of the company’s assets, the revenue of the company dropped dramatically, leading to the temporary closure of the company.
The revival of the company back to its functional state involved the reconstruction of the premise. The management was able to recruit a crew for the repair, and it took the company approximately three months for the repairs to be completed and the business to be reopened. After the reopening, the recovery of the business operations was also a slow process as the company had to wait for the residents of the City of Kenner who had fled in search of refuge (Burton & Hicks, 2005). A significant fraction of the workers could not make it back, and therefore, the human resource management at the company had to organize for new recruitment strategies. It was also difficult for the company to obtain deliveries of supplies and food due to compromised transport and communication networks. As residents resettled at the city, the company had to employ promotion initiatives to create awareness and improve sales. Within a year, the company had reinstated back to normalcy despite having registered significant losses during the disaster.
We can draw several lessons from the Golden Corral’s case during Hurricane Katrina. One of the lessons we can draw is the relevance of transport and communication in the operations of a business. A business is supposed to have well-established emergency networks and infrastructure that can be used in the event of a disaster. From the case, we can also observe the important value of a community to business. The paralysis of operations at the City of Kenner negatively affected the operations at Golden Corrals, and it was the revival of the City that also facilitated the revival of the company. This is a demonstration of what can be described as a symbiotic relationship between the business and the community.