City's property managers prepare for disaster.

You're a property management executive. You're delegating responsibility for the day's activities, when all of a sudden; fate throws a wrench in your gears.

Twelve unmarked police cars and vans pull up almost simultaneously at your building's door. The officers rush out, wearing FBI jackets.

You ask the senior officer what's going on and he explains they have a search warrant for one of your tenants and they want to talk to you later.

What do you do?

These and other frightening situations, including possible bioterrorism, were presented randomly to teams of property managers recently at a "property management disaster" workshop, sponsored by Attainium, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel. The training company's slogan is "Business Continuity Through Planning, Prevention and Preparedness."

Bob Mellinger, Attainium's president, said the workshop was designed to "help people better communicate and hone their decision-making skills."

"A number of them walked away with a new perspective," Mellinger said. Mellinger described an incident where a property manager had to take a call from a hospital saying that the incident involving several employees throwing up was caused by food poisoning at the company's breakfast meeting.

"While this was going on, there was still a mercury spill in the lobby," he said, adding that, by the way, it was "Take-Your-Kid-To-Work Day," leaving children open to the possibility of mercury exposure.

"Building managers deal with this stuff every day," Mellinger said. The crowd who attended the workshop are property managers, engineers and "the people you'd find in a normal management office."

After running through various scenarios and discussing their strategies, attendees were given a scorecard to rate their respective teams on how they addressed each vital issue.

Issues included organization of responsibilities, thinking ahead in decision-making processes, communicating effectively with the police department, handling the mercury spill safety and deciding whether or not to cancel the new tenant lunch appointment.

Mark Landstrom, vice president and director of property management for CRG Management LLC, said the seminar was the second such workshop he'd attended in the past 10 years.

"It reinforced our continued planning we've spent a lot of time on under different scenarios," Landstrom said.

The crucial decisions he was faced with during the seminar mirrored real-life, he said.

"In all of our emergencies, whether it's a smoke condition or people trapped in an elevator, you go to an emergency response mode that you've planned and stick to that plan," he said. Prior to Sept. 11, Landstrom said, high-rise safety guidelines called for evacuation of a floor in crisis and the floor above it to the next-lowest re-entry point.

But with the mass confusion of Sept. 11, these policies are being rethought, he said.

Landstrom had firsthand experience with the subject. CRG managed a building on Broad Street--a short walk from the World Trade Center site--at the time of the 2001 attacks.

Short on knowledge of the situation (all he knew was that two planes had hit the Twin Towers), Landstrom knew the area near the New York Stock Exchange was dangerous.

"Our building was in close proximity to the Stock Exchange," Landstrom said. "Our thought was to get people away from the targets."