GREENSBORO, N.C. -- Officials at major gas station equipment maker Gilbarco Veeder-Root knew that damage to their customers from a strong storm like Hurricane Katrina was inevitable. "You're talking about hundreds, at minimum 200 and probably 400 stations, impacted to the point of being out of commission for an extended period," Terry Ross, Gilbarco's vice president and general manager of service, told The Business Journal Serving the Greater Triad Area.
"Canopies were down, dispensers flooded, the convenience store buildings were all damaged in the [image-nocss] flood areas and by the storm surge," Ross said.
From the time evacuees started gassing up their cars to flee before Katrina's landfall, the availability of fuel, or lack thereof, was of paramount importance. Rescue boats, emergency vehicles, generators for electricity and power tools for rebuilding all run on gasoline.
Gas stations are "a critical component of the infrastructure," said Ross, who estimated repair costs in the millions. "For the first several days, all of our contractors in the area were really supporting rescue crews, trying to get fuel sites up close enough to the impacted areas to be able to support the emergency vehicles."
Gilbarco's role manufacturing and delivering the equipment needed to make those repairs has been low profile but high impact in both the immediate aftermath of the storm and in the weeks since, said the report. Gilbarco President Gary Masse appointed Ross to coordinate the company's response to the storm. Ross assembled a team that met every morning at Gilbarco's Greensboro, N.C., headquarters to review the most immediate needs and to make sure that orders coming in from the hurricane zone were given top priority in the manufacturing plant.
Employees worked overtime taking orders and passing requests for spare parts through to the product managers, while account managers worked to identify crews in surrounding states that were available to enter the disaster zone.
Communications from the scene were key, Ross said, and one of Gilbarco's important sources of information was Butch Shelton, operations manager for Rittiner Equipment Co., a major Gilbarco distributor and service contractor in southern Louisiana. Shelton and his team had evacuated from a New Orleans suburb when Katrina bore down. Once he was able to make his way home the day after the storm and take a look at his own property, he went out to check on customers. In some areas, Shelton told the newspaper, most of the damage to c-stores was done by looters.
Where the storm and flooding was the worst, however, whole stations were submerged and steel signs and structures were twisted around "like pretzels."
With Gilbarco's plant supplying the necessary parts, Shelton's crews set about prioritizing repairs in the hope of making fuel available to as many people as possible as soon as possible. "If we had a site in a less-traveled area that wasn't badly damaged compared to a site in a well-traveled area that did have some damage, we'd still take that one because we needed to help as many people at once as we could," Shelton said.
Ross said the single most common necessary repair was to the submersible pumps that push the gasoline from the underground tanks to the dispensers. That damage was caused less by the storm itself and more by the mass evacuation that preceded it. "Prior to the hurricane, those tanks run dry because everybody is filling up and leaving town" causing the pumps to burn out, Ross said. "Normally a site would stop and catch that during a lull, but in a mass exodus the site runs dry, and then when it comes back up, it runs dry again because of the limited number of stations operating."
Above ground, physical damage to the dispensing equipment was also common, said the report. Wind and debris completely destroyed a lot of equipment. What was not physically destroyed was often ruined by wind-driven rain and flood waters.
The financial impact on the station owners, especially the independents, is severe in many cases, Shelton said. One modern gas pump can cost around $11,000, plus installation. Many of his customers were expecting insurance to pay for repairs, but he said some are finding their policies only cover the building and its contents, not exterior equipment. "That's something you have to specify," which many owners did not know, Shelton said. "I have one [customer] who had been around forever and always assumed he was covered. Now, of his nine locations, he's lost three."
Ross said the total equipment cost of rebuilding a destroyed station could range from $60,000 to $100,000 dollars, depending on size and setup.
That means the total retail cost of the equipment to repair or rebuild 400 stations could be $20 million or more, depending on how many stations require full rebuilds or only partial repairs, the report said.
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