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CHAPTER SEVEN | TWIN STORMS
Drying Out
While the Brooklyn office operations continued, there still was the issue of the wet certificates.
DTCC’s vault was a disaster—and not just from the water itself. The vault’s location was near a parking garage with a spiral driveway down to the garage’s fifth level. “The water had so much pressure coming in, it basically burst through a cinderblock wall,” Bodson said. “It also created this whirlpool as it filled up the vault. A few weeks later, it was like pulling paper out of a washing machine as the water drained.” Despite the damage to agents, clients and the vault and its contents, DTCC worked with regulators, transfer agents and other stakeholders to identify new approaches to continue processing corporate actions and other time-critical physical processing despite the unavailability of the certificates. By the time DTCC could access the vault, it was cold, it was wet, there was no power and there were 1.8 million wet certificates in excess of 10 million disparate pieces of paper that were strewn about. Making matters worse, the oil tanks for the generators had burst, so the vault reeked of oil. “One of our employees reached out to a contact who was involved in the restoration of paper,” Bodson said. “They gave us the name of a firm that knew how to complete the salvage and another firm that could do the freeze-drying to try
The Brooklyn office (top) housed DTCC’s backup data center (inset) in the event of a natural disaster or other type of catastrophic event that could disrupt its operations. (Top photo by Joanzin courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
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