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Banking & Finance

Banks That Sustained Hurricane Damage Resume Operations

By Jenny Callison, posted Oct 2, 2018
Bank locations in the Wilmington area are mostly back to healthy operations after varying degrees of impact from Hurricane Florence. A couple of branches, however, remain on the injured list.
 
BB&T’s Castle Hayne location was closed as of Tuesday, according to the bank’s website, which updates branch status daily. Also closed is the TD Bank branch in Hampstead. Employees from the Hampstead location are working in TD Bank’s South College Road branch at present.
 
Newly opened is Wells Fargo’s branch on North Third Street in Wilmington, according to company spokesman Josh Dunn. Dunn said Monday that the downtown branch had just come back on line, the last of Wells Fargo’s local locations to do so. The facility suffered “moisture and water coming in from the windows and subsequent air-quality challenges stemming from that.”
 
“We had three branches suffer severe damage due to flooding,” Dunn said in an email last week. “We also had wind damage to several of our drive-thru facilities, including damage to paneling and wires, as well as the tubes that transport the cash.”
 
First Bank’s Southport branch was cut off from its surroundings by floodwaters. Staffers were unable to get to the building, so its reopening was delayed, said regional president Brad Mickel. Overall, Brunswick County First Bank locations had less damage than their counterparts in New Hanover County, he said.
 
Regarding First Bank’s branches in New Hanover County, Mickel reported some water intrusion at its locations downtown, Monkey Junction, Landfall Shopping Center and Porters Neck.
 
“It was nothing too terribly bad,” he said. “We were actually able to get back on line pretty quickly, thanks to the monumental efforts of our employees.”
 
Several other banks also reported damage to their structures.
 
The Bank of America building on Third Street downtown experienced some damage, but the branch was open as of last week. Officials said that all Bank of America branches in the area were damaged to some extent except the location in Carolina Beach.
 
Financial technology firm Apiture, the fifth-floor tenant in the Third Street Bank of America building, is addressing roof leaks as a result of Florence.
 
Apiture executed its business continuity plan ahead of the storm, relocating Wilmington-based critical operations staff to office locations outside of the affected area, according to president Christopher Cox, who added that the rest of the Wilmington team worked remotely from safe locations. 
 
"We discovered the water damage to our office after the storm, and worked with our property manager on cleanup and restoration,” Cox said in an email. "This required our employees to work remotely while the initial remediation was being performed.  Repairs are almost complete. Some repair work is continuing after hours, but our team did return to Apiture HQ on October 1. Our priority was making sure the Apiture team was safe during and after the storm. It has been great to see the Apiture team, and the greater Wilmington community, come together to help each other during the storm and after."
 
While Florence knocked out power, inflicted structural damage and scattered employees to sites all through the Southeast, banks had another important issue to address: security.
 
“We had conversations around putting an armed guard out in front of our branches so we could [safely] give people access to cash,” said Marshall Cooper, CresCom Bank’s senior vice president and regional executive.
 
Cooper said his bank was concerned that customers would need cash to pay available contractors to make repairs or to clear trees, and with electricity out, bank drive-thrus and ATMs were non-functional. CresCom did not have to resort to its worst-case solution since it was able to restore basic cash services to its Military Cutoff branch drive-thru shortly after the hurricane. Its downtown Wilmington and Oleander Drive branches saw drive-thru service return Sept. 20, although the lobbies remained closed longer because of interior damage.
 
With area residents encouraged to evacuate, many banks did not have the staff needed to reopen in a safe and secure way, even when the lights went back on and systems were running again.
 
“The safety of our employees is first and foremost,” Cooper said. “We can’t open a branch with just one person. It isn’t safe. We’d like three.”
 
Several banks reported that damage to their facilities was minimal and that operations were back to normal soon after the storm passed. Those include First National Bank, PNC Bank, South State Bank, Bank OZK (formerly Bank of the Ozarks), Select Bank, Aquesta Bank and Sound Bank.
 
Live Oak Bank, despite some damage to its Wilmington headquarters on Tiburon Drive, was fortunate, officials reported.
 
“Our headquarters sustained only minimal damage and our employees returned to campus starting Sept. 20,” spokeswoman Claire Parker said in an email Tuesday.
 
“Our employees were able to use Live Oak’s cloud-based systems from remote locations throughout the Southeast to continue servicing customers to close loans, make transactions and answer questions. Hurricane Florence was the first real test of our cloud-based banking operations, and we were successfully able to maintain service to our customers while ensuring the safety of our employees.”
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