For the past year and four months, the Tristar’s Long Beach claims department, along with their Information Technology department, has worked in the Tristar Santa Ana office--for about four months immediately after the fire--and then approximately one year ago, a temporary location was leased a few blocks away from the Temple Avenue location at 1680 Hill Street.   Now the new building, which is state-of-the-art and highly energy saving, had been in construction since soon after the fire occurred.  Since the tragedy was something they were stuck with, Tristar decided to seize the opportunity and build a modern building with high technology which would be optimally energy efficient and on the cutting edge. 

A preponderance of the lighting inside the building is from the sun--it is solar light--which is piped in through tubes which extend from the roof, through the ceiling, and then run along the underbelly of the ceiling. 

Jim Roberts, the claims manager of the Long Beach branch office, said, “On the second floor, we have these sky lights like I have never seen before.  These are called light tubes.  It’s a tube that runs through the ceiling out through the roof.  It has reflective material all through (the interior of) the tube, which generates an amazing amount of light.  I think the reflective material in the tube is a magnifier.  We could actually turn the lights off on the second floor and still have very decent light because of these light tubes.” 

The concept is basically of a sky light, with a tube that runs through the ceiling up to the roof. The light from the sun from the roof goes into the tube and it reflects back and forth inside the tube because of the highly reflective nature of the interior of the tube.  Then it flows through a lens which is like a diffuser, a refractor.  The light is, henceforth, diffused and what is created is a very soft light. 

“So, we have fewer artificial lights,” Jim Roberts says.  There is less of a need for artificial light because natural light is being piped into the inside from the outside. 

“The light tubes are really neat,” Roberts continues.  “Everybody who’s been in here says, ‘I want those in my house’". 

The miracle which occurred after the fire, was that there was no loss of data.  Tom Veale, an owner and the Customer Service Manager of Tristar, who lives in the Los Angeles area and went to the scene of the fire the night and the morning of April 28th and 29th 2009, explained to this writer in May of 2009 that the Disaster Recovery Plan—called the SAS-70 process--created and put in motion by Deloitte and Touche, was the key to Tristar’s survival and the reason there was little down time and no loss of data.  Veale expressed that six to seven years ago he didn’t have this plan, and he acknowledged that his recovery would have been much more difficult and have taken much longer had the fire happened in 2002 instead of 2009.  

Now today, in the brand new 2835 Temple Avenue building, “We are fully up and running,” Jim Roberts states.  According to Roberts, the move went fine; it was very simple and very seamless.  Speaking of the current beauty of the interior of the office, he commented, “We haven’t had years and years to collect a lot of garbage, so it’s very beautiful.”  

The claims department occupies about two-thirds of the building.  The claims unit is on the first floor with the IT department, but then the claims department also has the entire second floor.  In anticipation of going completely paperless, each claims desk has two big flat screen monitors.  One is vertically oriented, and the other is horizontally oriented.   The vertical one is excellent for reading letters composed on 8.5 x 11 inch dimensions, and the horizontal one is great for reading spread-sheets. 

So, this writer asked Jim Roberts how he felt, and how it seemed to him being in the new building along with his sense of the future prospects of the company.  He said, “I’m not sure we’d do it the same way to get a new office, but now that we’re here, we’re definitely pleased.”  And then he laughed good-naturedly.  Jim continued to say, “We’re glad to be here.  This is home.  This is the flagship office for the company, since it’s the closest to the home office and it’s also the brand new facility.” 

The servers are coming home soon to the new state-of-the-art computer room, in about a month. When the former building burned down, it had housed the primary datacenter.  The new computer room now is completely fire proof.  The back-up systems created by the Deloitte and Touche SAS-70 system were definitely key to the full recovery, but now the computer room is fire proof, to boot. 

The Tristar Long Beach branch office is definitely like a thrown cat.  It has landed on its feet.  A disaster turned itself into a great creation.  A new beginning is now transported into our modern age. 

Readers may write to writer Lonce LaMon at lonce@adjustercom.com