Hurricane Rita Hits Industry Hard

A week after Hurricane Rita slammed into the Gulf Coast, manufacturers’ reps and distributors are scrambling to find weatherheads and other storm-related materials, as utilities press to bring power back to the Gulf Coast communities that got clobbered by the hurricane.

“We’re seeing a lot of activity that is hurricane-related and we anticipate seeing more, particularly from Rita, once they get their feet on the ground and evaluate the damages,” said Tom Hodges, principal of Hodges Southwest Inc., a manufacturers’ rep in Houston.

“We’re bringing in substantially more inventory. We’re doubling our Condumex wire and cable inventory of VNTC (vinyl nylon tray cable) and THHN. With our Topaz, we have a whole container of weatherheads coming in, along with other things. We are getting calls from all over the place for these things. But a container of weatherheads is a lot!”

Bill Elliott, president, Elliott Electric Supply, Nacogdoches, Texas, said his company stocked up heavily on weatherheads. “The manufacturers don’t have any more, but we still have inventory of most of those things. We don’t know what the demand will be; we will probably see more of a rush as we go along and people start rebuilding their services. We have ordered the manufacturers dry.”

Meanwhile, electrical distributors who had operations in the path of Rita are waiting to reopen locations or to get their power back on.

Earlier this week at Elliott Electric Supply’s Nacogdoches headquarters, employees’ children were watching DVDs in the company’s air-conditioned training room so employees could come to work after losing power from Hurricane Rita.

Bill Elliott said Nacogdoches was hit pretty hard by Hurricane Rita, but there was no structural damage to Elliott Electric’s locations in Texas or Louisiana. Elliott and his son, Billy Elliott, vice president, both have lost power at their homes and doubt it will be back up anytime soon.

“Down my street there are transformers sitting in the middle of the street and primary lines laying on people’s lawns,” said Bill Elliott. “It’s surprising the amount of damage that was done, and the crews seem to be working rather slowly. The majority of the city is on, but there are certain sections of the city that are worse than others. Part of the problem is a lot of these people volunteered to go down and rebuild Katrina, so we just don’t have as many people as we would have normally to help us rebuild all these lines. It’s taking longer for them to get things back up.”

Although generators were difficult to find before the storm, Elliott said the company stocked up on card connectors for the generators, which people often have difficulty finding, and cord.

“We’ve been through it enough times to know to stock up on some of that. But even so, we ran out of card connectors. It’s unevenly spaced. We have a bunch of them in West Monroe, but they didn’t get hit. Freight lines are not delivering yet in Houston. Or UPS. UPS won’t deliver until Wednesday (Sept. 28).”

Summit Electric Supply, Albuquerque, reopened all but one of seven stores that it evacuated before Hurricane Rita. Acting under evacuation orders, the company closed its Clute, Corpus Christi, Beaumont, Houston and La Porte locations in Texas. Additionally, owing to severe storm conditions in the area, the company closed its New Orleans and Broussard service centers. All the stores, with the exception of Beaumont had power, phone and data lines on Sept. 26.

While all employees that worked at Summit Electric’s Beaumont location have been accounted for, the Summit Electric location did sustain some damage. Sheila Hernandez, the company’s vice president of marketing, said two walls of the Beaumont warehouse were blown down and the bay doors were blown out. Inventory loss is minimal, she said. Power is expected to be out for two to three weeks.