Companies Working to Rebound From Ike
Sep 15, 2008 7:52 PM
If there was anything good about Hurricane Ike, it was the opportunity for Houston-area companies to prepare.
As Ike churned through the Gulf of Mexico, gaining size to the point where it was a monster stretching nearly 500 miles in diameter, the landfall estimates changed radically. On September 8, the predicted eye landfall was just north of the Mexican border near Brownsville. The next day, the projection had moved up the coast to Corpus Christi. By Thursday, models had it smashing into Freeport – just 60 miles west of Houston, putting the nation’s fourth-largest city near the eye and on the dreaded “dirty side”.
At General Body Mfg Co, they rented a generator and air compressor, which according to operations manager Josh Paull will allow them to be 50% operational today and possibly 100% by the end of the week.
“We were prepared before the storm came and had a game plan for whatever the aftermath of Ike was going to be—short of total devastation, of course,” he said. “We have relatively minor damage. No trucks got damaged. We have some roof damage on the shop but overall, it’s light compared to what it could have been.
“We were able to reach 35 of 70 employees (by Monday). As long as there’s no rain, we can weld. Our main thing is power. Like any truck equipment house, we run a lot of welders and need pretty high voltage for that. Until we have full power, we’re limited as to what the generator can produce as far as wattage. We’ll have about eight bays working, full air-compressor compatible, but only about two welders as opposed to 15.”
At Travis Body and Trailer Inc, they spaced their trailers out far enough so they wouldn’t bang into each other if the wind knocked them around.
“We had about 40 trailers in the yard and none of them turned over or tossed about,” president/COO Bud Hughes said. “We were pretty fortunate. We didn’t do probably as good a job as we would have with better notice. But I think we came through pretty well, all things considered.”
Hughes said the only damage was the loss of eight overhead doors in the shop. As of Monday afternoon, Travis had partial electricity in the office but not full power in the shop.
“We’ve got a downed power line that may or may not be the culprit,” he said. “We had half of our workers show up and they did re-arranging of scattered things and then we sent a lot of them home at noon, because we can’t weld.
“Every day you’re not building trailers, it’s gone forever. It’s like a hotel room that didn’t get rented last night. You’ll never be able to recover that night of revenue. Short of working overtime, we’ll never make up for that. Fortunately we do not have a huge backlog, so it’s not that critical.”
At RKI Inc, Ike caused minor damage to the facility: a fence was blown down and a corner of the building peeled up.
President Tom Rawson said he believes the power never went out at the facility, but the bigger problem was that many employees still had no power as of Monday afternoon. But 30% of them showed up for work in the morning.
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