Last Thursday night, I went to bed thinking Hurricane Helene’s path was nowhere near my bank’s footprint. I was home in North GA for an appointment that day. Friday morning, I was awakened to my CEO calling me at 6am asking if I was okay. I was, my bank was not. Queensborough has 25 branches from Augusta to Savannah, GA and two operations centers - primary ops in Louisville, GA & secondary ops in Augusta. On Friday morning, we only had power at 3 branches, we had no cell service across the entire 150-mile footprint, my primary ops was up on a generator but no connectivity and due to downed trees & power lines, folks couldn’t get out of their homes. My whole bank was closed. Communications were near impossible & making sure we accounted for our employees was a challenge. Things deteriorated as the city turned off the natural gas that powered the primary ops generator because they had a break in the line. Thankfully we had some remote employees who had power & internet, employees who had personal generators, & employees who used their laptops & cell phones as a hotspot to process critical files for customers. On Friday, I was in contact with our security vendor Southern Bank Equipment & ATMs procuring replacement batteries for our alarms because those would be dying soon with no power. We got through Friday. Saturday I loaded 2 generators I was able to buy along with 40 gallons of gas in my SUV, met my alarm vendor & loaded another 150 alarm batteries in my car and headed to Louisville. I grew up on the coast of SC, so I’m no stranger to hurricanes, but what I saw when I got there, I hadn’t seen since Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Getting gas was also now a dire need because gas stations were closed, or limiting the amount per sale & only accepting cash. Lines were stretching down the interstate and folks were waiting for hours. Sunday was another delivery of generators & more gas and refilling cash in an ATM that was functional. Water was turned off in some of our municipalities. On Monday we were able to reopen branches that had power restored and move customer care and limited operations employees to a facility with power. Through the week we’ve reopened more locations with power restoration and brought up others on generators running limited operations. Today we got natural gas back on at our primary operations center to run the generator and because we have an ITM in our lobby we were able to open and service customers at our operations center because we are still without power in Louisville. Tonight, we can serve customers in nearly every Queensborough community. Through this process, I couldn’t be prouder of my team. They’ve led with their hearts and have been creative in problem solving, they’ve been dedicated to taking care of our customers and worked nonstop to get us to where we are today. Thank you to the first responders and to the linemen restoring our communities, and thank you to my team for restoring our bank.
