Summing It Up
• Yes, it can happen to you—if you learn nothing else from this story, learn to be diligent about data backup, safe records storage, and the need to consistently review and update disaster recovery plans. |
Mondays are traditionally when club managers try to get away from their demanding duties for at least a few hours. But on Monday, June 11 of this year, a day when Inverness Country Club in Birmingham, Ala., was closed to members, Bill Ochsenhirt, the club’s owner and General Manager, still went into the office—and discovered just how demanding his duties could really become.
Around 1:00 PM, just as a staff member came into Ochsenhirt’s office and asked if he smelled smoke, fire alarms started blaring. Ochsenhirt bolted into the clubhouse, spreading the word that everyone should get out, while simultaneously trying to find the source of the problem.
He followed the smell, growing stronger with every step, to the other end of the 17,000-sq. ft. building. He went into one of the club’s dining rooms, lifted a door leading to the attic, and saw flames shooting to the roof.
A blur of frenzied activity followed. Ochsenhirt ran around trying to get staff and those who were in the building attending a function out to safety. Once he knew the clubhouse was empty, his thoughts turned to how he could salvage the essentials of club operations. By this time, however, the building was fully engulfed. “I was barely able to get back to my office,” he recalls. “I only had time to grab my laptop and my keys.”
As he stood on the golf course behind the building, and it be-came increasingly clear that nothing would be spared, Ochsenhirt asked firemen if they could go back and at least get a couple of computers out of the accounting office. Thankfully, the firemen were able to do so.
As he watched the clubhouse go up in smoke, Ochsenhirt’s cell phone came alive with calls from friends and colleagues who were watching reports about the fire on CNN and the Internet. “Hey, Bill,” they all asked. “Is that your club on fire?”
More Shocking News
By 3:00 PM, the fire was declared “under control”—because the entire, 34-year-old structure had already burned down to the slab. Firemen later said the clubhouse, which was not required to have sprinklers, had a plywood and tongue-and-groove ceiling, which hampered their efforts to pull sheet rock and penetrate the attic from below.
Two firefighters, in fact, had to be treated for heat exhaustion while trying to battle a blaze that at one point sent flames shooting 100 feet high, and generated billows of smoke that could be seen from miles away.
As Ochsenhirt began to realize just how quickly and completely everything was being destroyed, things got even more surreal. Police came onto the property to inform him that a teenager had confessed to his parents that he was an accomplice in setting the fire. That quickly led to the arrest, that same Monday evening, of a 14-year-old who, it turned out, was the son of an Inverness member (as was the other accomplice who later confessed). Over the course of their prosecution, it was revealed that the two had not only set the fire on purpose (by propping a ladder against the back of the building and climbing up to pour kerosene on the roof), but that in previous days they had even practiced how to get up there unnoticed. What’s more, after starting the fire on Monday, they had been among the group who gathered on the golf course to watch as the clubhouse burned down.
Moving Forward
Holding a kids’ camp as scheduled the day after the fire provided a needed source of energy and helped owner/GM Bill Ochsenhirt (top left), and everyone among the Inverness staff and membership, refocus immediately on the rebuilding process. |
There’s no evidence that the clubhouse was targeted for anything more than its convenience, but it’s still understandable why Bill Ochsenhirt doesn’t want to dwell on that part of the story. And while spectacular fires and “insider crimes” always make for juicy copy, the truly spell-binding part of the Inverness tale is the inspiring spirit of resiliency, and interest in helping others learn from the experience, that he and the rest of the staff and membership have demonstrated.
“Don’t make any mistake, it was a devastating emotional experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” Ochsenhirt said five months later, standing on the clubhouse slab. “And you really don’t come to realize how much a part of people’s lives a club is, until something like this happens. For the first week after the fire, my wife stayed on the property pretty much the entire time, just to help meet and comfort all the people who felt the need to drive up and look at the scene, because their wedding or some other important part of their life was tied to this place.”
Ochsenhirt himself had to literally start over from scratch—his first act, at 5:30 AM on Tuesday, was to go to a Wal-Mart, buy a pad of paper and a pen, and sit under a tree on the golf course, writing out the steps of a recovery plan. An e-mail had already gone out Monday night to the club’s 500 members, with the announcement that the golf course, swimming pool and tennis courts, all of which had escaped damage, would remain open with normal hours of operation. A kids’ camp that had started that week went on as scheduled, providing a welcomed source of energy and activity to the property.
“While the clubhouse provided a wonderful place for creating memories during the past 34 years,” Ochsenhirt said in that initial message to members, “we have not lost the heart and soul of Inverness—our great membership and staff. We will rise to the challenge of creating a new clubhouse that will proudly serve you for many years.”
Three days later, another message went out detailing plans for temporary facilities and procedures that would be used for the rest of the season. Two weeks after the fire, the announcement was made that an architect for a new 25,000-sq. ft. clubhouse had been selected. As summer moved into fall, while the slab and other evidence of the fire’s fury were still impossible to ignore, the mood and spirit of Inverness continued to brighten by the day, as the shape of the exciting things to come came into clearer focus.
“We took this as a good chance to step back, take a deep breath, and look at what we wanted to do with the club,” says Ochsenhirt, who bought Inverness from Metropolitan Life in 2005, and owns and operates two other Birming-ham-area clubs (Pine Tree and Heatherwood CCs), through Diamond Clubs Management.
“Right after we bought Inverness, we had some big plans to build a new clubhouse that would include luxury condominiums [C&RB, December 2005, pg. 16],” he notes. “But then we had to put those on hold, because of how construction costs shot up in this region after [Hurricane] Katrina.
“In the meantime, we’ve had a lot of success with our ‘SportsPlus’ program, which is the same as a sports membership for tennis, pool, fitness center and clubhouse privileges, but also includes 12 rounds of golf a year, with no added greens fees. We’ve also had great response to our ‘FamilyFirst’ programs, as another strong attraction to prospective members. These programs have helped to give us a new perspective on what our clubhouse needs—and doesn’t need—to be.”
Through the fire, Ochsenhirt has also gained a new appreciation for what it means to be a careful club operator—to the point where he now openly encourages industry colleagues to learn from his experience.
“Like everyone, I thought this could never happen to me,” he says. “I thought I was being good about backups and offsite data storage, but I learned the hard way you can’t afford to ever leave those as ‘things you’ll do tomorrow.’ Fortunately, I had an insurance company that was absolutely great about helping me recover quickly, even in the areas where I’d left myself in a hole.”
Inverness plans to open its new clubhouse in the spring of 2009. |
Ochsenhirt is proud of how his staff and membership has taken the high road to recovery, given the circumstances of the cause of the fire.
“From day one, we’ve focused on keeping things positive, avoiding gossip, and doing what’s needed to rebuild as quickly as possible into an even better club,” he says. “As I wrote to the membership two weeks after the fire, it certainly wasn’t how we would have written the script—but now that it happened, all we can do is rise to the challenge and do everything we can to make sure the club comes out better and stronger.” C&RB
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