Tornado Leaves Quite a Paper Trail in Downtown Fort Worth

After the tornado--the winds of 113 mph that howled through Fort Worth last month--at last there fell a silence. Silence, and a gently gliding drift of paper, liberated from a thousand desks.

Wills and tax forms, checks and FBI files, the papers flying from tornado-ruined offices were lifeblood for some businesses and agencies. For others, though, the drifting documents meant just a hitch in work that really takes place electronically--and resumed a few hours later.

Dashing to rebuild, Fort Worth businesses are finding that the digital divide extends even to natural disasters.

Because it slammed downtown an hour after quitting time March 28, the storm just missed thousands of workers. Instead, it turned its attention to hundreds of workplaces, many concentrated in high-rises.

Across Tarrant County, the tornado, and another 30 minutes later, caused up to $450 million in damage, destroying almost 100 homes. Five people died, most in neighboring Arlington. But in downtown Fort Worth, the main casualty was commerce.

Oil and gas firms, their products safe in far-off tanks, have been quickest to bounce back. Some needed just call-forwarding and phones to get to work again. Law firms--more than 300 of which occupied one building alone--have had a harder time, since data for their estimated 30,000 clients include documents or evidence.

At least one lost file holds the difference between life and death. On Thursday, the Texas attorney general gave death row inmate Ricky McGinn a reprieve because the twister hurled papers for his appeal from his lawyer’s Mallick Tower office. Scheduled to die on April 27, McGinn was granted another month so that his attorney could reconstruct the files.

“I don’t care what kind of lawyer you are--you have to work with paper. You have to work with people,” noted Blake Cox, a partner with the Law, Snakard & Gambill firm housed in downtown’s Bank One building.

But the greatest blow of all may be to those that sell tangible products from specific spaces. “The majority of people impacted will be small businesses, entrepreneurial businesses, the shop or retail center, where the store is gone,” said Daniel Torpey, the director of insurance claims for the PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting firm.

Fort Worth’s three FBI squads, housed in the Cash America International building, store files in computers that survived the storm intact. The bureau can download that information from computers elsewhere, said Special Agent Lori Bailey.

National security information, she added, has its own protocol: Files are stored in heavily secured safes. But much sensitive material was just sitting there, the old-fashioned way, on agents’ desktops when the twister struck. That paperwork now lies strewn across the county.

“There’s no doubt that we lost information that’s probably going to affect or prevent us from indicting particular cases,” said Bailey. “Say we had some sort of financial crimes, and we needed the subject’s checks. Those checks are out the window, and there goes your proof.”

After the tornado, FBI officials returned to the building, searching, securing and gathering important papers from the surrounding area. Residents also called the agency to turn in documents that flew their way. Although the beginnings of an inventory suggest “nothing earthshaking” is missing, Bailey said, plenty of the FBI’s written information still drifts around at large.

The other day in the post-storm sunshine, Cash America International and its neighbors Bank One and Mallick Tower looked like they had survived an earthquake. Thousands of plate glass windows gaped open in the balmy air, with cubicle dividers, dark-wood conference tables and desks ungracefully exposed. Below, on margins of the highway and the nearby Trinity River, paperwork from all those desks flapped fitfully.

A gleaning from the drifting scraps: One page, marked DRAFT-DRAFT-DRAFT, skewering someone’s proposal: “Despite the strong case for this product development effort, the organization continues to struggle with too many priorities and scarce resources,” it says. One pink message slip; the caller “still has bad headache and won’t be in today.” One itemized tax form listing the client’s deductions, including $40,000 for entertainment.

Besides creating angst in anyone who ever trusted his affairs to paper, the errant documents have paralyzed some businesses.

“One guy, a divorce attorney, started crying,” said Ellen Sterner, a spokeswoman for the Chamber of Commerce. “He said, ‘My whole life is shattered. I’m supposed to be this hard-boiled attorney, but I’ve never felt so emotional in my life.’ ”

In the business equivalent of finding one’s lost wedding ring inside just-caught fish, a $59,000 settlement check was found intact on the roof next to the law firm that lost it.

Optimistically, the public library has asked residents to turn in important-looking documents they find. Treating all as legally privileged, the library has amassed four garbage bags of paper plus one briefcase, spokeswoman Marsha Anderson reported.

“I’ve gotten calls from paralegals and secretaries, who are resting idle saying their bosses don’t want to pay them to do nothing, and sent them over to shake through the documents,” said Anderson, who is also on the city’s disaster response staff.

The business community is trying to help, said Donna Parker, the Chamber’s senior vice president. Some firms are lending office space, others giving temporary jobs to displaced workers. Compared to the city’s last natural disaster--a 1940 flood--Fort Worth business has recuperated quickly, thanks to telephone and remote-computer technology. Nationwide, disaster recovery has sped up vastly in a few years, because of widespread Internet access.

“With the Internet, information is more immediate, and the person who has the damage can probably provide more meaningful information to the insurance company right away,” said Torpey. It’s a striking difference, he added, from Hurricane Andrew less than a decade ago, when overburdened fax machines took hours or days to transmit information.

“Our computers were up and running throughout the whole disaster,” attorney Cox said. “We could still call in and get our e-mail.”

Even for the most digitalized firms, though, the space part of the time-space puzzle can still be a problem. Downtown, where commercial space was 81% occupied before the twister, the quest for replacement offices now is frantic. It’s all the more intense due to another space-related problem--the large space beside Fort Worth, known as Dallas.

“I had several really good clients that called me,” Cox said. “They were very, very kind, very supportive. The gist was, ‘Don’t worry about any of our files, we’ll give you some slack. If there’s any emergency we can always use our backup firms in Dallas.’ No! No! There’s fierce competition.”

Less lucky, though, may be businesses such as the Seventh Street Barbershop--now nonexistent save for its shingled roof and sign. “Hair today, gone together,” a wit has scribbled on it gloomily.

In general, said David Passey, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 40% of small businesses severely affected by a natural disaster will not reopen.

Unlike information businesses, there’s little for the Seventh Street Barbershop to offer up its clients electronically. And eight days after the tornado, the shattered enterprise wasn’t reachable by telephone.

There’s some traditional assistance for such companies. On Friday, President Clinton deemed the Fort Worth area a disaster zone, entitling victims to aid including low-interest, small-business loans.

At the very far end of the old economy, meanwhile, stand the five Hinojosa brothers from Zacatecas, Mexico, who have lived in Fort Worth for 10 years.

Ranged before their two adjacent houses in blue-collar Monticello, the Hinojosas crossed their arms identically and stared. Brother Antonio’s once-simple house was now simply a wreck, bereft of roof and windows.

But if the house the Hinojosas own is shattered, their business is untouched--impervious to vanished e-mail, flying documents or splintered high-rise windows. Their livelihood is in their hands, Antonio explained: the Hinojosas all are carpenters. Once they help rebuild the city’s mangled offices, the brothers will come home and rebuild for themselves.