Adjusting To The Incomparable

Across the river, just miles away, the colossus still smolders, an ever-thinning column of smoke rising from the ruins into a bright, clear September sky weeks after the unspeakable happened. This side of the Hudson, I sit in GAB Robins' suburban headquarters with the loss adjustment company's president and chief executive officer, Joseph M. Zubretsky, a man whose business life, like so many others', is suddenly and utterly riveted on the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. I ask if this even remotely compares with anything else in his long professional experience. "This one stands far apart," he answers, somberly, noting that no other catastrophe has involved injury and loss of life on this scale. Then, too, "it's deliberate and heinous in nature," he says. "It's beyond wind-blown roofs and dented cars. It's personal. It's visceral. That's what makes this different."