Blizzard Pounds New England Electrical Businesses With Up To 3 Feet Of Snow

New England distributors, reps and their customers are still digging out from the Blizzard of 2005, which dumped up to 3 feet of snow on some areas of the Northeast last weekend.

At least 15 deaths were linked to the storm, which lashed some parts of Massachusetts with whiteout conditions and piercing wind gusts of more than 80 miles an hour.

South of Boston, many towns were buried by heavy, wet snow that turned to ice in single-digit overnight temperatures, creating problems on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, where scattered power outages persisted and roads remained unplowed through Jan 24. Boston’s Logan International Airport closed for 29 hours, its longest shutdown since the Blizzard of ’78.

Granite City Electric, Quincy, Mass., with 19 locations throughout New England, was hit hard by the storm. Looking out his window at a 10-foot snowbank, Steve Helle, company president, said the blizzard dropped 2 feet of snow or more on half of the company’s locations. The Cape Cod area was hit hard.

“I have four stores down in and around the Cape,” said Helle. “They just got crushed; I mean there’s no place to put 36 inches of snow.”

Two days after the storm, Helle said his stores on Cape Cod were open, but that employees were selling “two rolls of tape and maybe a light bulb.”

“People can’t get to the stores, and our delivery trucks are struggling to get to job sites, which are also snowed in,” he said. “It’s definitely going to affect our business. There’s been emergency business, but the problem with emergency business is even that can be limited. People can’t get here.”

At Northeast Electrical/Eagle Electric, Canton, Mass., Sonepar’s New England operation, five dedicated employees used their four-wheel-drive vehicles to drive to the company’s central distribution center during the storm on Jan. 23. “They prepared ‘time-commited’ orders promised to contractors at a certain time,” said Carl Brand, president, Northeast Electrical/Eagle Electric. “They pulled those orders and we were able to deliver those on Monday morning.”

The company opened its Canton location late in the day on Jan. 24, but Brand said business was slow because customers did not venture out into the snowstorm. “You certainly can never make up a day of business,” he said. “It was dead yesterday.” Business seemed better Jan. 25 because the local public works department did a good job plowing the roads, he added.

Tom Punch, Electra Spec Inc., a manufacturers’ rep in Norton, Mass., said his business got about 2 feet of snow from the storm. Punch said his employees were able to get to work on Jan. 24, but that business was very slow. He said most distributors in the area were open on Jan. 24.

“When you get storms like this, it shuts down the construction sites,” he said. “Consequently, they (distributors) are not getting the calls from their customers for orders. They, in turn, are not calling us and ordering from us. It takes a few days to dig the job site out from a storm like this.”