July/August 2005
Extreme weather—from hurricanes and tornadoes to dangerous ice and snow—can disrupt recyclers and cause expensive damage. Here’s how several recyclers cope with the worst that Mother Nature throws at them.
By Robert L. Reid
Imagine waking up one morning after a bad storm to find your scrapyard flooded with so much water you can barely see the tops of the railcars. Or being forced to abandon your office and work from home for roughly a month because of back-to-back hurricanes. How about shoveling snow for several hours before you can even start work. Or seeing a tornado spin by your property—and maybe even smash into your site, tossing scrap metal as much as a mile away.
Such extreme weather has plagued scrap processors and brokers across the nation, from hurricanes in Florida to snow and ice in Alaska, in the heart of America’s “tornado alley” region and under the brutal heat of the southwestern sun. According to statistics from RecycleGuardsm, the ISRI-sponsored casualty and property insurance program, scrap companies filed 141 weather-related claims from January 2001 to January 2004, broken down as follows:
• 41 claims involving wind and hail that cost a total of $1.4 million;
• 81 claims involving lightning that cost $705,000;
• five claims involving collapses due to ice and snow that cost $500,000; and
• 14 claims involving rain and hurricanes that cost $153,000.
These numbers represent only part of the picture since many scrap processors don’t carry insurance to cover such losses. For instance, one recycler without flood insurance suffered a $500,000 loss last September, all of which had to be paid out-of-pocket.
In one sense, it may seem ironic or even unfair for the weather to damage recycling operations. After all, scrap processors and brokers are working to protect the very environment that sometimes works against them. Yet the recyclers contacted for this article all took their experiences with extreme storms in stride. Sometimes, they even find the proverbial silver lining behind the proverbial—and the real—dark clouds that can disrupt their businesses. Here are some of their stories.
Under New Management—and Under Water
In early September 2004, Vonna Cloninger and cousin Mike Cloninger had recently become co-owners of Biltmore Iron & Metal Co. Inc., a full-service scrap metal operation that sits near the fork of two rivers in Asheville, N.C. Also at that time, Hurricane Frances was smashing into the U.S. eastern seaboard. Though heavy rains from Frances had soaked the region during the night of Sept. 7, Vonna, CEO, wasn’t particularly worried. In the past 200 years, the two nearby rivers had never flooded badly.
Sometime that night, though, the city opened the floodgates of a reservoir in an effort to limit damage in Asheville itself. City officials tried to warn local businesses ahead of time, but their late-night calls were made to the businesses’ offices. “Of course we’re not at work in the middle of the night, so we didn’t get the call,” Vonna notes. By the time she might have retrieved the message from her company’s answering machine, it was far too late. The phones were floating in some 56 inches of water that flooded her offices, she says.
Vonna and her husband, Jeff, the company’s president, had expected some damage in the aftermath of the hurricane’s torrential rains, but they weren’t prepared for what they saw on television the next morning. A local news crew was on a bridge that crosses Biltmore Iron’s property, filming the disaster. “They showed our business under water,” she recalls. “That’s how we knew it had flooded—we saw it on TV.”
Blocked roads stretched the Cloningers’ normal 30-minute commute into a two-hour ordeal that culminated when they “waded into the building,” where the rushing water, now dropping, was still a good four feet deep. Vonna faced a surreal, even absurd scene—an old piano from a nearby antique store carried past on the strong current while a little yellow sign warning “Caution: Wet Floor” floated inside her offices. “The floor was definitely wet!” she recalls with resilient humor.
The mayor of Asheville and other city officials met the Cloningers at the site. Recognizing the vital role a scrap facility plays during such emergencies, they offered their assistance. “They said, ‘We’ve got to get you open so that people will have a place to bring all their material,’” she recalls. “So they pushed [the local electric utility] to give us temporary power, and we were only shut down for a day and a half.”
The water had receded within 24 hours, leaving behind a four-inch layer of mud over much of the yard. Employees immediately went to work shoveling this muck out of the way, but there was still a lot on the ground when the company reopened for business on Sept. 10. That was when the storm-generated scrap started to pour in, nearly tripling Biltmore Iron’s volume. “We had people lined up out the road, out on the highway to come in,” Vonna says.
At first, there were few clean places to store all of the scrap, so the company did suffer some downgrades for shipping muddy material. For the most part, though, consuming mills “were very, very nice to us,” Cloninger says. She also praises ISRI’s assistance, first in helping her still hold a New Southern Chapter meeting that was scheduled for Asheville right at the time of the flood and later for replacing free-of-charge all of her firm’s ReMA safety resources that were damaged by the water.
Eventually, even the weather began to cooperate, with warm days that helped dry everything out. Also, when Hurricane Ivan arrived later that same month, it dumped just enough water to clean off some mud without causing another flood. The yard was also protected with sandbags by this time.
Returning Biltmore Iron to normal operations has been a nine-month effort that was only nearing its end in May 2005, Vonna says. The company remained on temporary electric power for roughly seven months, and a new baler purchased just prior to the flood still had not been installed at presstime.
In addition, some 10,000 square feet of office space had to be gutted, dried out with huge dehumidifiers, and renovated. The firm also lost a crane because its electrical system was damaged by the flood, a large number of tools, six large dumpsters that were simply swept away, and an unknown amount of scrap that was likewise carried off by the rushing water.
“We don’t really know how much inventory we lost,” Vonna says, noting that the water shifted piles of metal around the yard. One five-foot-tall pile of busheling, for instance, was carried about 50 feet to the other side of some railroad tracks.
So far, the flood cost Biltmore Iron roughly $500,000—all of it out-of-pocket since the company opted not to carry flood insurance before the incident (premiums were about $100,000 a year) and probably couldn’t get it now at any price, Vonna says.
When a River Runs Through It
Flooding also caused considerable headaches for City Carton Recycling Inc.’s Iowa City plant during the summer of 1993, when storm after storm after storm drenched the region, recalls John Ockenfels, president. When water from a nearby reservoir went out of control on July 4, the Iowa City plant—located next to a river—had only a few hours of warning, says Ockenfels. Since it was a holiday, only Ockenfels family members were present, but they quickly swung into action, using forklifts to move large bales of OCC and road construction barriers into position, then covering these makeshift levies with sheets of plastic held down by sandbags.
City Carton also had to practice a kind of transportation triage in its lower-lying storage lot. “Water was coming up so fast we couldn’t get everything out,” Ockenfels says, “so we had to make some priority decisions about what to save first.” In the end, an old truck and several old trailers were abandoned to the surging river.
In addition, the plant’s corrugated receiving area and its loading docks ended up under about a foot of water and remained flooded in the rain-soaked region for three months. “So our drivers just wore boots and drove through it,” Ockenfels says. “We had a very good concrete surface under that, so we just continued to drop and hook trailers into our loading docks through the water since those were our only docks for that facility.”
Inside the building, a flooded receiving room and conveyor pit had to be sandbagged off and temporarily abandoned, Ockenfels says. “As the trucks drove back and forth through [the water outside], they’d splash water up and over the sandbags, and we could go down and pick up fish off of the receiving room floor,” he recalls, laughing.
In the end, all that driving back and forth over flooded concrete forced City Carton to resurface some of its yard, Ockenfels notes. Also, damage to trucks from prolonged exposure to this dirty, mucky water meant “we spent the next fall and winter changing a lot of wheel bearings.” He estimates that the flood of 1993 cost City Carton close to $100,000 in damages, though he believes the company was luckier than some of its customers. The Iowa City plant never shut down during the severe weather, but a number of businesses where it collects paper were at least temporarily put out of business when their facilities ended up completely under water or the roads to reach them became impassable.
“It sounds like a cliché,” Ockenfels says, “but when you think you have a problem and then you look around and see how much worse other people had it, you realize you didn’t have a serious problem.”
Mighty Winds
High winds from hurricanes or tornadoes also pose threats to recycling plants. In 2003, for instance, a municipal recycling center in Ada, Okla., was outright destroyed by a tornado, while in the 1970s, Commercial Metals Co. (CMC) (Irving, Texas) had a twister strike its Lubbock, Texas, facility.
No one in Lubbock was injured, since the tornado hit during the night, but scrap metal from the site was found as much as a mile away, notes Alan Postel, president of CMC’s secondary metals processing division. Hurricanes also forced CMC to evacuate a Houston site in the 1980s, and the company has evacuated all its Florida sites at one time or another in recent years.
And it isn’t just a company’s yard that’s at risk: In May 2004, a new City Carton truck driving on an interstate highway was flipped into a ditch by high winds during an early morning thunderstorm, notes John Ockenfels. The driver was slightly injured and didn’t return to work for a couple of days, the truck needed about $35,000 in repairs, and a diesel spill from the truck’s ruptured fuel tanks had to be cleaned up, Ockenfels says.
Fortunately for recyclers, the most severe winds don’t often make direct hits on their operations—but there have been some fairly close calls. About five years ago, City Carton’s facility in Cedar Falls, Iowa, had a tornado “go right across the front of our plant,” Ockenfels says. The site didn’t suffer any damage, but the high winds did blow around some paper and create a mess to clean up. Likewise, tire recycler Four D Corp. (Duncan, Okla.) has faced tornadoes close enough for employees to see the funnel cloud, notes Max Daughtrey, vice president of operations.
Recyclers that work in the heart of America’s “tornado alley” region often keep watch on growing storms with weather radios tuned to special channels for storm information and with Internet sites that tap into local Doppler radar information. In addition, these scrapyards often work with safety experts and other outside consultants to hold tornado drills or develop disaster plans that identify safe locations for employees during a tornado (such as basements or interior rooms that are away from windows).
Storms that produce lightning can force recyclers to shut down equipment and get employees safely inside buildings, especially at yards operating tall equipment such as cranes that might act like giant lightning rods. Four D has it especially rough since there’s one lightning hazard the company can’t escape unless it relocates—the tall cell-phone tower that sits across the street, notes Daughtrey.
Unfortunately, his tire processing equipment can’t be restarted with product inside. So whether Daughtrey shuts down machinery ahead of a lightning storm—which can happen a half dozen times a year—or gets shut down by a sudden storm that catches employees off guard, the result is several hours of downtime that costs anywhere from $500 to $1,500 each time.
I’m Dreaming of a White Scrapyard
Winter, of course, means snow and ice in many parts of the country. In Wichita, Kan., for instance, a bad ice storm this past January knocked out power for half a day at Glickman Metal Recycling L.L.C. The storm shut down Glickman’s operations entirely for that day. It then created scrap headaches for the next several days: Suppliers, for instance, were reluctant to venture out on the icy roads, and the outside scrap boxes that Glickman wanted to collect were now covered by as much as a half inch of ice, notes Bret Robinson, assistant general manager. Meanwhile, Glickman employees had to thaw out the firm’s equipment, ranging from trucks to scales, using mostly deicers and antifreeze—products that had quickly become hard to find in frozen Wichita.
For City Carton, winter means sending along a bucket attachment with each skid-steer that goes out to collect paper bales, explains John Ockenfels. The bucket can quickly replace the skid-steer’s forks to help clear a path to bales in, say, a grocery store’s parking lot that was plowed overnight, leaving a mountain of snow between the skid-steer operator and the scrap paper.
Of course, when it comes to snow and ice, it’s hard to beat an Alaskan winter, which generally lasts from Thanksgiving until late April, notes J. Chris Alexander, general manager at Alaska Metal Recycling (Anchorage). Alexander has seen the snow six feet deep in his scrapyard—though three feet is the average for a typical winter—and temperatures can plunge to -35 degrees F.
Just getting ready for work each day can be a chore. Employees often spend as much as 20 minutes putting on all the layers of clothing needed for arctic work, plus sometimes several hours of chipping ice, shoveling snow, and warming up equipment that runs with special cold-weather greases—all before starting their actual recycling work. Also, if they plan to weld something that day, they have to preheat the metal all night so it won’t crack from the stress of extreme temperature changes.
Though originally planned by founder Alton Newell Sr. as a summertime scrap business, Alaska Metal has gradually become a year-round operation. Heated water and a partially enclosed building enable the company to run a Newell wet-system shredder—despite being “probably the worst place in the world” for wet shredding, Alexander jokes. The harshest winters can shut the plant down for a day or so, but that has only happened about three or four times in the past 10 years, he notes. Indeed, one of the advantages of working year-round is that the company can keep an experienced crew in place that understands the potential hazards of working in a frozen scrap facility rather than hiring new employees each spring.
Working through the winter even opened up a new business opportunity. Alaska Metal now operates a “snow dump” for the city of Anchorage, accepting snow that was plowed from streets and parking lots and that otherwise would pile up too high for safety or convenience. Then, using the equipment it needs to test its own storm water, Alaska Metal monitors the city snow for potential contaminants when the spring thaw begins. “It gave us a huge winter activity that is extremely profitable,” notes Alexander.
Making Peace With Mother Nature
Despite the drama, disruption, and expense of severe weather, the recyclers contacted for this article don’t seem to hold any grudges against Mother Nature. Instead, City Carton saw its loss of several old vehicles as an opportunity to “clean up some junk,” notes John Ockenfels. Likewise, the ice storm that temporarily shut down Glickman Metal Recycling generated thousands of feet of good aluminum scrap from downed ACSR power lines—more than the company usually sees at one time, says Bret Robinson.
Even Vonna Cloninger can find something positive about the $500,000 loss she and her husband and cousin suffered shortly after acquiring Biltmore Iron & Metal. Because the flood forced them to put in brand new offices, “we started with a whole new everything,” she says. “We have absolutely gorgeous offices now.”
Too Darned Hot
At Tucson Iron & Metal (Tucson, Ariz.), heat and dust and dirt are the major weather-related challenges, notes Doug Cohen, general manager. Breaking up the workday into two noncontiguous shifts—from, say, 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and then 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.—is one way the company copes with the extreme heat of the southwestern desert, which typically reaches 110 degrees F in the middle of the day and then “cools off” at night to the 90s, Cohen explains. Though the firm doesn’t actually shut down during the hottest hours, it reduces the more intensive work, such as processing and baling, he adds.
Keeping employees hydrated with bottles of cold water and available fountains, along with air-conditioned buildings where they can eat lunch or step inside when the heat bothers them, are crucial steps to recycling scrap in especially hot weather. Rooftops in the plant are also covered with white tar rather than black to reduce the absorption of heat.
Tucson Iron must also sometimes wait for overheated machinery to cool down a bit or unclog radiators that get choked by the dirt and dust that blow year-round in Arizona, Cohen says. To solve the latter problem, the company has service trucks with mobile compressors that blow the radiators clean while the machinery is still out in the yard,
he notes.
Hurricane Home Work
When hurricanes Frances and Jeanne slammed into south Florida in September 2004, the building that houses the offices of scrap paper broker Nini Krever lost power for most of the month. So Krever, president of Traders International Corp. (Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.), had to work out of her home, contacting customers and ports, scheduling trucks, tracking shipments, and even planning a major Paper Stock Industries Chapter meeting with help from data she keeps handy in her Palm Pilot (for at least the first week she wasn’t able to retrieve any files from her shutdown offices).
Even working from her home was difficult, however. “At my house, there was intermittent power, and computers and phone lines were down,” Krever recalls.
Moreover, traffic lights weren’t working and gasoline was in short supply, which made driving anywhere an uncertain and even dangerous activity. Plus, the whole region was under a nightly curfew. The highlight of some days, Krever recalls, was getting a cold bottle of water that the city was handing out so people could cope with the summertime heat. “If you’re spending your time worrying about water and showers and staying cool, it was really difficult to focus on work,” she muses.
One bright spot—after the fact—was Traders International’s business interruption insurance, which helped compensate Krever for her losses. By comparing monthly sales and payroll records, “it was pretty clear to the insurers that we didn’t write much business between the two hurricanes,” she says.
Robert L. Reid is managing editor of Scrap.
Extreme weather—from hurricanes and tornadoes to dangerous ice and snow—can disrupt recyclers and cause expensive damage. Here’s how several recyclers cope with the worst that Mother Nature throws at them.