Gaylord’s Nashville Properties to Cost $215 Million to Restore After Floods

Gaylord Entertainment Co. says it expects the total remediation and rebuild cost for its properties in Nashville, Tennessee damaged by early May’s record flooding to be between $215 million and $225 million.

The costs include approximately $165 to $172 million for Gaylord Opryland, $16 to $17 million for the Grand Ole Opry, $7 million to $8 million for attractions, $7 million to $8 million for administrative buildings and $20 million for contingencies.

Offsetting these costs are business interruption and property insurance proceeds of $50 million and a federal tax refund of approximately $30 million.

Since the hotel is located in a federal disaster area, the company will be permitted to amend its 2009 federal tax return and carry-back the flood casualty loss against its taxable income in 2007.

The company does not expect to reopen Opryland until November and The Grand Ole Opry in October.

The company said it would cut more than 1,700 jobs at its Opryland hotel. It expects to begin rehiring employees before it reopens in November.

“We have made significant progress in our work to assess and repair the damage inflicted by the historic flooding,” said Colin V. Reed, chairman and CEO of Gaylord Entertainment.

“Flood damage requires an extraordinarily complicated repair process,” he said. “We have had to manually test every aspect of our mechanical, electrical, information technology, and power generating systems in order to understand what works, what needs to be repaired, and what needs to be replaced.

There is an entire city of infrastructure which operates under the Gaylord Opryland campus, the majority of which was fully under water, and thus the assessment process has been extensive.”