A 2009 Office Fire Helped Prepare AmeriGas for the COVID-19 Disruption

More than 10 years after a devastating electrical fire severely damaged the multistory headquarters of the AmeriGas Propane company, knocking the structure out of commission for almost 14 months, AmeriGas has been taking the lessons learned from the blaze and using them to find ways to adapt amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The fire, which struck Dec. 16, 2009, at the company’s administrative building in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, caused massive smoke and fire damage that shuttered the structure until repairs and improvements could be completed in February of 2011.

And while the fire taught AmeriGas several lessons about how to improve IT disaster recovery and IT business continuity processes, it has also helped prepare the propane supplier for the global health crisis that is affecting its operations today.

No one was injured in the blaze, which also damaged administrative offices of UGI. After the fire, the companies implemented established disaster recovery plans that had been put in place a few years earlier to prepare for such a disruption.

AmeriGas’s Justine Staub

Justine Staub, director of workforce development for AmeriGas, told Channel Futures that the having an established disaster recovery plan in place when the fire struck greatly assisted its eventual recovery. “I was involved from an HR standpoint and worked to get people into their new workspace” after the blaze. “For a crisis of this magnitude, it went very smoothly and our customers never knew there was a problem. The disaster recovery plan was key to keeping things working with no interruption of customer services or employee payroll.”

That incident forced some employees to work from home for a short time, but the company quickly found temporary offices for most workers and had those operations running within a week or two, she said.

“It was one of those things where you never thought it would be used, but boy was it critical,” Staub said of the disaster recovery plans. “We all, or most of us, received new computers because of the smoke damage” within a week or two after getting into the new temporary offices, which were three miles from the company’s building.

In response to the current COVID-19 crisis, AmeriGas corporate employees are using company-issued laptops to do their work remotely from home, said Staub. “Our company is fully enabled to support our customers during this challenging time and we are not expecting any delivery suspensions or supply issues. We are working with our suppliers to ensure continuity of supply and leveraging our proprietary trucking, rail and terminal to compliment this effort.”

Another Amerigas employee, who asked not to be identified, told Channel Futures that before the blaze, the company was just starting to provide laptop computers to its office workers instead of desktop PCs. The move to laptops exclusively came quickly after the fire. Workers were also provided with monitors, docking stations and other needed supplies to do their work from home.

In addition to the temporary offices that were opened, the company was also able to move…