Rachel is a 50-something woman in New Jersey whose rush home from a visit to her parents’ house to beat the worst of Superstorm Sandy last week had an unusual consequence.
She left the paperwork she had brought home in the front seat, so as not to get it soaked in a downpour, only to wake up the next morning to find that a fallen tree branch had cracked her passenger window, and the papers were sodden and torn.
The papers were mostly stock certificates she had taken from her parents because they were looking to sell some shares and re-title others into a trust.
While you’d like to think it was just a rare case of bad luck, she’s hardly alone. In fact, in a story most investors seemed to miss in the aftermath of the storm, one of the bigger custodians/clearinghouses for Wall Street, Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., reported that a flooded vault had jeopardized roughly 1.3 million paper certificates it had stored there.
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