Hurricane Irene has driven home the importance of disasterplanning to one of Vermont's credit unions.

“We found out how important [disaster plans] are and they savedus from what could have been worse,” said Terry Field, vicepresident of finance at the $565 million Vermont State EmployeesCU, which even on Friday night while the storm was still hundredsof miles away “decided that we would start all of our disasterplans that night because I remembered when happened to us in Maywhen we had disastrous floods.”

And so through the weekend the disaster drills and midnight and6 a.m. staff conference calls continued with staffers at the CU'ssix branches.

It was good that they did because sespite all that advance work,the Montpelier CU still ended up with property damage at astill-closed facility in a flooded state office building inWaterbury, said Field.

“We are simply at the whim of the state when we can reopen butwe had our employees in there today to take out cash, personalpossessions and member information,” said Field adding that interms of priority “those are the most important things we getout.”

Curiously, power outages while plaguing CUs in some other partsof the state were never a major problem for his CU but “we neverexpected those rains and the flooding which were devastating,” saidField.

If the CU's disaster plan would have been perfect, “we wouldhave anticipated on Friday that we needed to pull out the computersand clear out everything from our Waterbury office,” said Field.But then if nothing happened, “then it might have beenoverkill.”