Ice Storm Freezes Local Manufacturers | Power outage crimps business for some in North Worcester County
Photo/Julie Jepsen
Ice coated limbs created havoc during the worst ice storm in Central Mass. in recent memory.
Photo/Courtesy
Ward McLaughlin, president of Boutwell Owens & Co. in Fitchburg, said employees helped the company fill its orders despite intermittent power.
When the disastrous ice storm hit North Central Massachusetts last month, Mastek Container Corp. of Fitchburg lost power for 11 days. That meant lost time getting orders out and, eventually, lost customers.
“We’re not a big company,” said business manager Sandy Mazzaferro. “We sell service. We had no service.”
Financial Disaster
Mazzaferro said the family-owned packaging company lost so much business that, weeks after the lights went back on, its machinery is up and running just three days a week because of the drop in demand. And its 60 employees are getting smaller paychecks and worrying about their future.
With recession already hitting the manufacturing industry hard, companies like Mastek say there’s a very real chance that it could be impossible to bounce back from the storm’s impact. And even more stable companies have lost significant business, while their workers have lost pay for the time they were down.
Some in the region say all this points to the potential for some serious long-term repercussions for the local economy.
Relationship Ender
Like Mastek, Alpha Rho Inc., a Fitchburg manufacturer of rigid plastic boxes, lost customers thanks to the storm.
Chairman and founder Alvan Tall said the company was shut down for “at least two weeks” and ended up losing two customers representing a significant piece of its business.
Tall said his customers are located all over the country and it was hard for them to understand the hardship his company was facing.
“We may have lost the business,” he said. “Because when you fail to deliver the shipment… they look for other suppliers.”
Like thousands of other business leaders and home owners, Mazzaferro and Tall are furious with Unitil Corp., the New Hampshire-based utility that supplies electricity to Fitchburg, Lunenburg, Townsend and Ashby.
Portions of the Unitil communities stayed without power for far longer than nearby cities and towns served by National Grid.
“This is the 21st Century,” Mazzaferro said. “I felt like the Waltons.”
Dan Curley, Fitchburg’s economic development manager, said many companies were particularly frustrated that there wasn’t good communication from the utility letting them know when power would be restored.
“You’d have your employees coming in hoping that you were going to have power and you wouldn’t,” he said.
At Alpha Rho, Tall said a Unitil representative promised on the Wednesday that fell five days after the storm that power would be restored by that Friday.
“I was so delighted that finally, finally the horror was passed,” he said.
But in the end, Tall said, it was another week before power came up, and Unitil never explained the delay.
Besides having few answers about why repairs took so long, companies have little recourse to get compensation for their losses.
Nancy Jackson, vice president of the North Central Massachusetts Economic Development Corp., said insurance payments and U.S. Small Business Administration assistance would apply only to businesses physically damaged by the storm.
“This was a different kind of damage, and it was only to the books,” she said.
Short-Term Help
To fill the gap in assistance, both the City of Fitchburg and the Economic Development Corp. are offering short-term, zero-interest loans to companies that suffered from the prolonged power outage.
Curley said the Fitchburg program will provide up to $10,000 for any business that can demonstrate it that lost money because of the storm and would have to reduce its workforce without assistance. The loans will come from a $100,000 pool of grant money intended for microloans. If that runs out, Curley said, he hopes to find partners or donors to replenish the funds.
Jackson said the NCEDC loans are modeled after the Fitchburg ones but will be available to companies outside the city. They will come out of a $300,000 pool of the corporation’s money, she said.
So far, Curley and Jackson said businesses have shown limited interest in the loans. But many companies, including Mastek and Alpha Rho, have not yet tallied their losses. Both companies say they are looking into the Fitchburg loan program.
While some companies may need loans just to keep making payroll, for others the effects of the storm are more subtle. At Fitchburg paperboard packaging company Boutwell Owens & Co., President Ward McLaughlin said power went off and on five times in the aftermath of the ice storm, for a total of 100 hours without electricity. Still, he said, thanks to intense efforts by his employees, the company managed to fill all its orders on time.
It was a difficult time for the plant’s 140 workers, McLaughlin said. They had to manually crank printing presses backward to protect machinery and materials during the outages.
Some days, they came in only to discover there was nothing to do and they’d need to go home and get just a minimal paycheck for the day. Other days, some had to come in at odd hours and work lots of overtime to get orders out.
“It was really tough on employees,” McLaughlin said. “Here you are at the height of the holiday season.”
McLaughlin said Boutwell tried to support its employees in return, offering them the chance to use stoves at the plant so they could bring a hot meal home to houses that were still without power.
Ultimately, McLaughlin said, the company escaped the worst possible effects of the outages, but it also spent plenty of extra money on outsourcing some tasks, paying workers for overtime, buying extra parts and bringing in specialists to get equipment restarted.
“When you thought you made a dollar, you might have been short a dollar,” he said.
Between the potentially fatal blows some companies suffered in the storm, the possible reduction in income for even less-affected companies and the lost wages for thousands of workers, Jackson said she and other economic development leaders are worried.
“We think it’s going to have sort of a dampening effect on the economy,” she said. “It’s bad enough that the economy was bad to start with.”
And Jackson said extensive media coverage of locals’ struggles with Unitil won’t help the situation.
“It’s lots of attention to the problem, but it leaves us with an image problem,” she said. “It doesn’t look like fertile ground to invest your money these days.”
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