CED

December 2012

Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/96778

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 28 of 75

Current Events during times of emergency. As you'd expect, the products in greatest demand are generators, chippers, forklifts, skid-steers and loaders. The rental business for anyone near the scene is at euphoria levels, not that anyone's gloating about it. Hoffman Equipment is tracking at 35-40 percent for rentals attributed to cleanup; Modern was going 24/7 round the clock on rental and sold two million portable power units in a week. Some 1,700 miles away in San Antonio, Holt Cat was among numerous Cat dealers around the U.S. that mobilized to help provide power to Sandy-struck regions. Holt's national response team deployed power generators and service technicians to New York and New Jersey, restoring temporary and permanent power in the areas. The company has also sold and rented more than 40 dewatering pumps and 100 light towers. Closer to the devastation, H.O. Penn, the Cat dealer based in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., kept its rental operation working through the weekend to get generator sets out to customers, reporting its entire inventory of 145 gen sets all on rent as of Oct. 30. The company deployed technicians onsite at 23 customer locations to provide round-the-clock support, as well. "The demand for rental of heavy Caterpillar equipment has also increased as the cleanup and the infrastructure restoration process begins," said President of H.O. Penn Jeff Mitchell. "Impacts were pretty widespread," he added. "A number of our employees had damage to homes, in varying degrees. Due to flooding in lower Manhattan, our phone service was Creative Kindness While donations of money are vital to meet the widest swath of need in a crisis, the management of Modern Group understands that people also like to give tangible, more personal things to help victims of disasters. And so, in cooperation with its manufacturing partners Bandit, Hyster, Generac and Terex, the company launched its "Sock It To Sandy" campaign to collect new socks, new hats and new gloves, which will be distributed quickly to those in need by The Salvation Army. The Modern Group Edison, N.J. branch, which is nearby the New Jersey Shore, one of the hardest hit regions, will serve as its "Sock It To Sandy" headquarters. In a letter to customers, employees and suppliers, Modern Group President Paul Ferrell said, "As the weather turns colder and the days since the storm increase, the devastation of the impact of Sandy multiplies. The outpouring of kindness has been phenomenal. Relief efforts from throughout the nation are helping restore power little by little, but the cleanup will take months and years. In the meanwhile, thousands are still without basic electricity and heat." The company collected donations through Nov. 26 as CED was going to press. disrupted in two of our branches. We had to quickly develop work-arounds to overcome the problem it created so we could continue to take care of our customers." Wind-related tree damage has been "unbelievable," says Griffith. And the lingering, debilitating loss of power on residents and businesses could continue till mid-December, he said. "The generator business is going to be white hot for months." Equipment replacement is kicking in, as dealers are witnessing just how many customers suffered damage or total loss to machinery left too close to the shores. "I'm a little surprised customers didn't pull equipment back from the water, but I think it caught a lot of people by surprise," Griffith added. Sad Truths Watters relayed that a customer in Breezy Point, N.Y., a particularly devastated neighborhood in Queens, lost his home, as did his son who works with him and another employee; nevertheless they purchased four machines to do storm cleanup work in their community. "There are a lot of homes that will need to be taken down," said Watters. "There's some demolition work for sure that's going to happen, but the flip side of that story is all the people in those homes that are going to be displaced, all the low-lying areas of New Jersey, where hundreds of thousands of people live right near the water. I don't know what the numbers are, but there are thousands of homes that are destroyed. "It's not like the kinds of dramatic things that are good for a picture, but they've all had four or five feet of water in them, and even more, on the first floor, so they're just destroyed. They think they're drying them out but they're all being condemned; they have to come down," Watters said. Griffith estimates the demolition work alone could go on for six months to a year. "Was it flood? Was it wind? We're going to learn a lot about flood insurance," he predicted grimly. "I'm concerned that some companies won't open." Ken Simonson, chief economist at Associated General Contractors of America (AGC), echoed that probability, adding that it will also take time for insurance proceeds to be parlayed into construction. "A number of businesses will not reopen," Simonson said, "and other businesses that were ready to expand or occupy new space and trigger investment by developers, they're going to postpone or cancel those plans. "And similarly with homeowners – while it is relatively easy to count the number of homes that were destroyed or will have to be demolished, that doesn't necessarily translate into one-for-one replacement," Simonson continued. "The net impact, therefore, on the construction industry, even within the region, will be small, and measured over a longer period of time, negative. I think any time you get massive destruction of wealth of any type you're going to be slowing down economic activity – and with that, construction activity." December 2012 | Construction Equipment Distribution | www.cedmag.com | 27

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of CED - December 2012