Due to technical problems, this column was not published on Monday.

Sometimes in the insurance industry, we tend to focus on the frontline people - the underwriters, the brokers and the marketing people. As a result, we often overlook the people behind the scenes who are responsible for keeping the wheels turning. Without the support staff, the operations of major insurance companies and brokerage houses would come to a standstill.

This was recently brought to light for Marsh Global Broking worldwide in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Debbie Blanchette-Smith is an accountant at Marsh Global Broking, Bermuda. Her job function has completely changed as a result of the tragic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. This is her story of how it all changed.

Debbie has been at Marsh for the last two years since her previous employer, J&H, merged with Marsh Global Broking. She had worked as an accountant at J&H for 15 years. Debbie's job function changed with her move to the Marsh offices because Marsh's accounting function was handled out of their New York office in the World Trade Center and not in Bermuda.

Instead of handling the daily transactions like moving premiums to the carriers in a timely fashion, tracking funds and identifying what these funds were for, Debbie became the liaison between the Bermuda office and the New York Office. Debbie's new role was to act as the troubleshooter where she was responsible for sorting out misunderstandings on statements, finding missing premiums and whatever else went wrong between the two offices.

Then when the tragedy struck on September 11, 2001, the worldwide Marsh Global Broking operation lost its entire accounting records. Fortunately, Marsh was able to recover all accounts as at August 31, 2001 but everything after that was destroyed.

On a positive note, Debbie says the two people she deals with who handle premiums were located and are alive and well, but sadly the one person with whom she dealt with in Treasury is still unaccounted for.

Because of the horror of the day, many of the Marsh employees were finding it difficult to return to normal as many of them were still attending memorials, funeral services and trying to regroup. The Bermuda Global Broking office, seeing their New York colleagues' need for readjustment, volunteered to take back their own accounting.

Debbie was able to quickly assume the role of taking over the accounting for the Marsh Global Broking Bermuda office because of her previous responsibilities at J&H. As a consequence, Debbie is responsible for bringing the Bermuda office's accounting information up to date and maintaining them on a go forward basis.

Debbie says the Bank of Bermuda has been very helpful in supplying them with bank statements so they can reconcile their records. Despite the disaster, there was not too much of a delay for posting and banking transactions. The small delay occurred as a result of their correspondent bank, Citibank going down for 24 to 48 hours, which meant they could not move money during this period of time.

Once Citibank was up and running again, they were able to resume moving money to where it needed to go very quickly. Debbie says the problem they have now is more of a resource issue than anything else. However, the captive management side of Marsh has also been very helpful by allowing two of their employees to come over and assist Debbie with inputting all the data lost from August 31, 2001 back into the computer as well as handling the daily accounting transactions.

Debbie is grateful for the sympathy and understanding shown by people she interacts with on a daily basis in the industry. She says people were going out of their way to accommodate Marsh's clients. Insurance companies were holding policies bound (covered) even though they had no evidence premiums had been sent to them because of the hiccups experienced with getting their bank lines up and running again.

Finding herself in this challenging position, Debbie was struck by our total reliance on computers and paper to conduct daily business transactions. She says not only did they lose the data that was stored on the computers, they also lost all of the hard copies to back up their transactions when the World Trade Center was destroyed. She found herself left with the very time consuming and difficult task of trying to match funds with clients. She says it is like trying to piece together a puzzle without a picture.

From a personal standpoint, Debbie says she feels detached from the whole incident because she lives in Bermuda and has not been to New York to see the remains of the World Trade Center. She says it is hard to believe that such an atrocity can really happen in the 21st Century. She can't understand why there is so much hatred in the world. She feels the pain of those she has worked so closely with but can't really relate to their experience because the terrorist attacks are so unbelievable - almost like something you see in a movie but not in real life. She ended by saying thoughtfully, "but it is time to move on".

Cathy Duffy is a Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) and is now a freelance writer. She is a former executive of Zurich Global Energy and has 15 years experience in the insurance industry. She writes on insurance issues in The Royal Gazette every Monday. Send questions and feedback to crduffyibl.bm.