Katrina's Harsh Lessons: Sometimes There's More to a Day's Work Than You Can Possibly Imagine
Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina's devastation in the Gulf states also experienced countless acts of kindness. We want to acknowledge that tremendous outpouring of support. We regret we don't have the space to recognize individually the thousands of stories of helpfulness and courage. --Grady Hazel, executive director, Society of Louisiana CPAs Like thousands of her former neighbors, CPA Geralyn Suhor, president of the New Orleans chapter of the Society of Louisiana CPAs, is a Hurricane Katrina refugee. The sole practitioner from the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette was lucky to be out of the state with her family when Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, submerging her home and office under nine feet of water. Among her losses were electronic backups of her business files. Although she was able to retrieve some soggy papers from an auxiliary office in nearby St. Bernard, La., what she recovered was incomplete--and even that took weeks of photocopying to make usable. A colleague offered her workspace in Metairie, La., a western suburb of New Orleans, where Suhor remained when tax season rolled around. KINDNESS OF STRANGERS For many people, Hurricane Katrina means lingering images of disaster: unimaginable winds, flooding, death and destruction, stunned survivors huddled in overcrowded and undersupplied shelters. The numbers are horrific: more than 1,000 people dead, nearly 284,000 homes destroyed, 71,000 businesses shut down--some temporarily, some gone forever. On returning home a month after the storm, Suhor says, "Besides every bush or tree being dead, what struck me was that there was no sound--of birds or squirrels or any natural wildlife." Fortunately, Suhor also has other, more hopeful memories: the fellow CPA who opened her closet and invited her to take any clothing she needed; the stranger who handed her sister a frozen turkey while the two of them inched along in a carpool line; the countless CPAs across the country who offered the use of their offices so Katrina refugees could begin rebuilding their practices. Still touched by those who stepped forward, Suhor says, "The storm opened the hearts of so many" BASIC NEEDS CAME FIRST That greatness of heart helps to explain, in part, how so many CPAs from communities hammered by Katrina have found the spirit to begin rebuilding. "Some folks are crawling into a hole and pulling the hole in after them," says CPA Jim Boyle, whose Mandeville, La., office escaped major damage but had no electrical power and other basic services for two weeks, "but others see this as the greatest opportunity they'll ever have." Those CPAs who are rebuilding have new awareness of what a major catastrophe can do to their personal and professional lives and ideas for working through disasters in the future. They understand, in a visceral way the rest of us can only hope we'll never experience, that the top priorities following a disaster have little to do with business. "In the first month, the last thing anybody was thinking about was their tax return," says CPA Jerry Levens, partner in charge of audit and attestation at Alexander, Van Loon, Sloan, Levens & Favre PLLC in hard-hit Gulfport, Miss. "It was, 'How am I going to get water and food? Where am I going to take a bath?' Those first weeks you're just grateful to be alive." "Our first contact with clients wasn't 'What do you need for your business?'" says CPA Angela Pannell, who fled to Starkville, Miss., after flooding wiped out her home and the CPA practice that had employed her for 21 years. "It was, 'Are you okay? Where are you now?'" Pannell is among those who chose not to resume life in the devastated area. TRUE GRIT Yet even as they tended to families, friends and colleagues dispersed by Katrina, many CPAs went to extraordinary lengths to get their practices up and running and to help clients start on the road to recovery. …