Earthquake: The Road To Recovery : Riding Herd on Disaster Claims : Insurance: Wherever catastrophe strikes, adjusters are there. They investigate damages and soothe frazzled nerves.

His first storm was Hurricane Alicia in Houston, 1983. He forged friendships during the Oakland fire of 1991 and renewed them the next March during the hailstorm in Orlando, Fla. He would have gone to Hawaii after Hurricane Iniki but he was too busy in Miami in the wake of Hurricane Andrew. On the morning of Jan. 17, even his mechanic in Peterborough, Ontario, knew where Geoff Montreuil was headed next. “He said: ‘Aren’t you going to Los Angeles?’ I said what for? He said: ‘They just had an earthquake.’ ”

Within 24 hours, Montreuil was indeed in Los Angeles, negotiating the insides of quake-broken houses and ministering to their shaken residents.

Montreuil, an insurance adjuster for ITT Hartford, is one of the cowboys of the industry. He and his colleagues move from one disaster to another, descending within hours of the devastation and staying on for weeks, even months, often shepherding a claim from the first on-site inspection all the way to the rebuilding.

The Northridge earthquake has sparked tens of thousands of insurance claims. (State Farm has nearly 80,000.) So that means armies of insurance adjusters will be camping out in Los Angeles long after the aftershocks subside. You may have seen them: men and women in polo shirts and jackets, all emblazoned with insurance company logos and some variation on the disaster theme like Special Disaster Team or Emergency Claim Service.

At the elegant Biltmore Hotel, where hundreds of State Farm adjusters are holed up, you can see them in the early evening in the lobby: Amid the usual crowd of European-suited men and high-heel-shod women, the insurance adjusters amble in, wearing bright red-and-white shirts, boxes of files under their arms, fatigue etched in their faces.

But forget about number-crunching paper-pushers--even though they do have to furrow through all those files at some spare moment. For these “stormers,” as they sometimes call themselves, the tools of the trade are tape measures, flashlights, cameras and fold-up wooden ladders--”everything you would need to go under, over or through a house,” State Farm’s Rick Cleaves said. Their ever-present cellular phones are practically holstered to their waists.

Few resemble elite athletes, but many can climb a ladder and casually walk a slanted tile roof with a clipboard in one hand and a tape measure in the other. They get as excited as astronomers discovering a supernova when they uncover some exotic destruction wrought by a storm--their catchall term for every disaster. “You’ll see structural damage you’ll never see at home,” said Cleaves, who left his 2-year-old daughter and five months’ pregnant wife--also a State Farm claims adjuster--home in Oklahoma for his monthlong stay in Los Angeles. “It’s unlikely I’m going to see earthquake damage in Tulsa.”

Spouses learn to cope.

“I’ve eaten insurance every night of my life for 26 years,” said Louise Corbin, whose husband, Joel, 52, is an adjuster and co-supervisor for ITT Hartford from nearby Fullerton. “I’ve learned it’s a priority.”

Some expect to be here as long as six months. (The Corbins have already invited some adjusters to Easter dinner.) “If they’re rebuilding their house, you’re with them the whole way,” ITT Hartford’s Martina Graham said. They move into hotels and apartments and inevitably stay long enough to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and holidays.

Cleaves had been home from the Malibu fires for only two weeks when he got the call. “I’ve never said no,” said Cleaves, 37, who is scrupulously polite and preternaturally disposed to calling every adult woman “Ma’am.”

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They do it for a mix of reasons--starting with the fact that it is not a desk job. Like soldiers seeing the world, they speak wistfully of time spent in Malibu (the fires) or Hawaii (the hurricane.)

“You’ll see an ‘insured’ who’s an accountant, who works all day at a desk,” said Montreuil, who for as long as he can remember has wanted only to follow in the footsteps of his insurance adjuster father, “and I’ll think, ‘God, that’s so boring.’ ”

There is also extra money to be made. State Farm pays $50 a weekday above salary and $100 a day above salary for weekend days on storm duty--which is always a voluntary assignment.

But the adjusters pride themselves on being part investigator--especially in an earthquake that can leave covert damage--and part psychologist to distraught insureds. “We get to hold their hands, hug them, give them money,” Cleaves said, “and help them to get their lives back in order a little bit that day.”

They would not seem likely candidates for canonization. “My mother still feels like insurance companies are thieves,” said Graham, 34, who has worked for ITT Hartford for seven years. “Sometimes I leave someone’s house with the feeling that I’ve done everything I possibly could . . . and they still think I’m trying to cheat them.”

And because earthquake policies are usually written with high deductibles (10% of a home’s value is common) that leaves a fair amount of room for confrontations between an adjuster and policyholder.

“They’re going to vent,” Graham said. “It’s part of the job.”

But adjusters insist that if there is any benefit of the doubt, they give it to the policyholder. “Our philosophy with Hartford is we go out and look for ways to pay it,” Hartford’s Ray Davidson said.

Or let them down kindly: “I sort of ease into discussing their policy with them,” said Montreuil, who has dabbled in politics in Ontario. “I think the real accomplishment is to go out there, explain their coverage and leave as a friend.”

He should know. “I’ve had people from Florida call me because they have a claim after Hurricane Andrew for a water pipe that burst--they call me in Ottawa--1,500 miles away! They want me to handle the claim.”

In place of home and hearth, these insurance adjusters develop something of a disaster fraternity--they bond with each other and keep in touch via electronic computer messages between disasters. When they walk into a hotel at a disaster site, it is like walking into a reunion. “We’re like a big family,” said Davidson, 46, who has worked with Montreuil and Corbin for years.

They consult with each other on claims, they live together in hotel suites, they eat together, they look for a place to relax together. At the beginning of a catastrophe, there is virtually no time off. “When you’re coming into a fresh disaster, you don’t have a social life,” one said. But gradually, there is a weekend day or two off. Although companies fly spouses in or adjusters home for a few days, most of the time there is just the work and their compatriots.

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Women are a minority among the adjusters, and some male homeowners have been known to run outside in disbelief when they see Linda Jarvis, a State Farm adjuster, climbing onto their roof. On rare occasions, Jarvis, who leads a team of quake adjusters, encounters resistance from male colleagues. During Hurricane Andrew, an adjuster--one of the “old guard,” she said, called her “Sugar Buns” during a phone conversation. “I let it go,” said Jarvis, a 51-year-old, lean-framed grandmother who went canoeing past alligators on one of her days off while working the hurricane. “I said he wouldn’t have said it if he’d seen me in person.”

Camaraderie is usually the rule. Over dinner near their hotel in the San Fernando Valley, half a dozen ITT Hartford disaster teammates told stories of borrowing ties and renting a limousine to go to dinner in San Francisco when they were working the Oakland fires. “If we’d had to drive, the parking fees for all our cars would have been as much as we spent on the limo,” Geoff Montreuil said. When they finally get a weekend off earthquake duty, they may go to Vegas.

But never were they more close-knit than during Hurricane Iniki in late summer, 1992--when they lived in condos in Kauai for weeks without electricity or hot water.

“Iniki was my first disaster away from home,” Graham said. “To me it was like this big adventure. We were camping out. We were in the trenches.”

There was no escaping the idyllic surroundings, though.

“I brought my Boogie board to Hawaii,” Davidson said. “We’d have dinner, drinks, go to the beach--it was as long as two or three football fields. The beach was ours.”

There was an unsuccessful attempt to find a nude beach as well. Like a secret society, they vowed not to divulge any other Hawaii-based antics. “We made a pact,” said Graham, whose promotion last fall to general adjuster was celebrated by the group when they were at the Laguna Beach fires.

In Los Angeles, adjusters do what other new arrivals do. They go to CityWalk. Or, as in the case of Cleaves and a friend, they drive determinedly into the hills in an attempt to get close to the Hollywood sign. (They didn’t make it all the way.)

After 12-hour days of dealing with the disaster-struck, they admit to some drinking--but insist that their biggest vice is eating too much (and exercising almost not at all.)

But they are not hitting Spago or the Ivy, and they eschew room service. Like frugal tourists on an extended vacation, they become connoisseurs of big meals at low prices--at restaurants they can walk to. After hours of driving each day, they are loathe to get behind the wheel for a dinner excursion. They look to cops for restaurant advice: “When policemen tell you where to go, you know it’s good food,” Cleaves said.

When Cleaves walked out of his Downtown hotel to a nearby restaurant and found it closed, a homeless man offered to give him a good alternative if Cleaves gave him a buck. He did, and the man recommended The Pantry. “Best one dollar I’ve ever spent,” Cleaves said.

Every now and then, someone attempts to cook. Jarvis crammed everyone into her Oakwood apartment and made a meal of chicken, noodles and corn bread.

Graham, who usually works alone in San Jose, welcomes the close society that develops around a disaster. “I don’t have that office socializing. That’s why it’s nice to be out here,” she said, hitting the road for a day of appointments.

Although Graham occasionally has to fend off a rude comment from a male colleague, most of the intractability she faces comes from male policyholders. “They always ask: ‘How long have you been doing this?’ When I tell them seven years, they quiet down.”

She pulled up to an immaculate house in Van Nuys. A 57-year-old man, a mason by profession, showed Graham around the house as she pulled out a tape measure and got down on her knees to scrutinize the earthquake damage.

“This door was completely jammed shut,” said the man, who asked not to be identified.

Graham examined the door, now hanging crookedly by its hinges. “The frame is fine,” she said. “The door just needs to be rehung.”

The man stared at her skeptically. “How long have you been doing this?”

“About seven years,” she said, smiling.

But insurance adjusters’ days in Los Angeles are filled not just with fractured foundations and tweaked doors. As Graham drove away from the Jorgensons’ house, she was musing on one of her more unusual assignments. Forest Lawn had filed a claim for damage to a statue of David.

Graham didn’t blink. “I have to go out and look at his little foot and see what needs to be done.”