The people of Gulfport are accustomed to hurricanes. There was Betty in 1972, Elena in 1985, Georges in 1998. And for those old enough to remember, there was Hurricane Camille in 1969, which wiped out hundreds of homes and businesses. The city of Gulfport has relief plans and shelters. People accept hurricanes as part of life, and, generally speaking, are prepared for them.
But not Hurricane Katrina.
When Hurricane Katrina and its 160-mph winds hit Gulfport head on, people knew it was a storm unlike any other they had known. For more than 20 hours it raged, bringing with it a 20-foot storm surge that devastated the coast for miles, leveling houses, hotels, restaurants, casinos, ports; destroying cars, piers and roads; and sending port containers like propelled battering rams to smash structures the waters didn't finish.
According to the South Mississippi Sun Herald's December 14 edition, Hurricane Katrina caused $125 billion worth of damage in Mississippi alone and destroyed 65,380 homes. More than 140,000 insurance claims have been filed in the area, and more than $1.3 billion in claims have already been paid. Many thousands of businesses were decimated; roads and bridges destroyed or rendered useless. More than 5,000 miles of roads were impassable after the storm; some still are.
Peoples' lives and livelihoods for miles around will never be the same again. And neither will the region's rental business.
This is the story of a few of the rental people and rental companies that faced the unprecedented power of Hurricane Katrina. People who never intended to be heroes saved others' lives, worked unimaginable hours and went beyond themselves in many ways, while others continued to work despite losses that might make work unimaginable under normal circumstances.
While many rental companies will profit from cleanup, removal and eventual reconstruction, rental duty is no easy task in these times. Rental companies have lost equipment to the storm, have had to reconstruct severely damaged buildings, have lost employees and still find themselves severely shorthanded, and work long, grueling hours despite losing homes, family members and friends to the storm. Daily life has become arduous with significantly increased traffic congestion, loss of infrastructure and the psychological effects of all these problems. Customers and local vendors and suppliers have disappeared or been wiped out, never to return to the area. And while new customers have appeared in abundance, a far more demanding screening process has become necessary to separate legitimate contractors and customers from “storm-chasers” of questionable reliability and honesty. Business is strong, but the seven-day workweek takes its toll. Not only are customers moving debris and cleaning up damaged properties, but rental center owners and their employees are doing the same just to have a place to sleep, just trying to make life bearabIe for themselves and their families.
Finding employees has been difficult along the Gulf Coast for some time. When FEMA came in and began offering $25 an hour for truck drivers, when tree removers offered high pay, area rental companies lost workers who jumped at the opportunities, even though the jobs would only last a couple of months. And other employees lost their homes and left the area.
In a way, rebuilding the Gulf Coast will also involve rebuilding the damaged lives and psyches of all those in the rental business and the people they come into contact with in their daily lives. While there is money to be made, and suppliers have been extremely helpful, the personal cost has already been great and the price paid won't get easier for a long time to come.
RER recently visited a few of the companies that are waging this uphill battle along the Gulf Coast. Here are a few of their stories.
Road Rage
When Hurricane Katrina was on its way in, John Milner invited his employees to take refuge in his well-constructed, thick-walled rental center in Gulfport. Bring your own bedding, he told them. Sixteen of his employees took him up on it and passed the storm in relative safety and comfort, while 160-mile-per-hour winds blew for more than 20 hours outside. His building didn't escape damage completely, with about $10,000 worth of roof damage and a few wet and rusted pieces of equipment, and he still has to replace water-damaged, discolored blue carpets, which he intends to do when business slows down and he has the time.
What Milner can't so easily repair — in fact, can't repair at all — is his beachside home, which he and his wife had spent years fixing up. The home is now nothing but a concrete slab. Milner and his wife brought a duffel bag partly full of the few clothes they could grab, and took refuge in the rental center. The Milners lived in a trailer behind the rental store for nearly 70 days until Milner was able to find a new home on the north side of town. They worked long days seven days a week. And Milner, a Gulfport deputy sheriff, along with other employees, had to arm themselves against looters in the immediate aftermath of the storm.
While Milner is wise enough to keep things in perspective and knows that many people suffered more seriously, Hurricane Katrina was not kind to his family. His sister lost her home to the storm, his brother lost two homes, and the home that once belonged to his grandparents — built in 1836 and now a historical site belonging to the city of Gulfport — was leveled to the ground. His 97-year-old mother died two weeks after the storm, with hurricane stress being a major contributor.
Milner has been through decades of hurricanes. In fact, Milner owes his very existence to possibly the greatest flood in the history of the United States, the massive 1927 flooding of the Mississippi River. His mother lived in Greenville, Miss., most of which was destroyed by the flood. His father, who owned a shrimp boat, and other boat owners took their vessels upriver by train to help rescue people trapped on their rooftops. One of those was a young lady who he later married — thus had it not been for the massive floods of '27, Milner wouldn't ever have been born!
Despite the hardships Hurricane Katrina caused him, Milner counts himself among the fortunate. His business and livelihood is intact and doing well and he did have the wherewithal to keep going in spite of everything.
Milner Rental Centers makes its living renting the small stuff, such as small stump grinders, carpet cleaners, carpet repair tools, electric demo hammers, generators up to 10 kW, and inexpensive electric submersible pumps. The cost for these items are low, the maintenance minimal, but the demand is strong, making the return on investment good.
Milner was four people short before the hurricane and is eight people short now. While customers have asked for earthmoving items such as skid-steer loaders, Milner knows he lacks the service staff to maintain them well, especially when exposed to the demanding conditions of hurricane cleanup and debris removal. He weighs the kind of investment that would be required, the need for service, and the likelihood that demand will slow down soon, and decides to stick with small tools and equipment no bigger than mini-excavators and personnel lifts.
In addition to demand for tools and equipment, demand for tents has been constant since the hurricane and Milner has provided them to relief workers and such unusual customers as a “disaster mortuary group.”
The hurricane wiped out quite a few of Milner's customers and suppliers. For example, a candy shop across the street supplied chocolate for Milner's chocolate fountains. The candy shop survived but most of its customers didn't, so the owner closed down and moved to Jackson, Miss. The local computer company that helped with computer-related issues — other than rental software provided by Solutions by Computer — moved to Memphis, Tenn., for the same reason.
Driving around Gulfport with Milner, he points to restaurants and shops and homes that completely disappeared, along with others that were damaged possibly beyond repair. Not only does Milner, a lifetime Gulfport resident, know the business owners and residents, but most were his customers.
“The convenience store is a customer, McDonald's is a customer, the sign shop is a customer, Region's Bank is a customer,” Milner says. “All these little businesses are customers. And they're cash customers. I deal with the police department, the fire department, the sheriff's department, the highway department, car dealers. The corner drug store is my customer. The local Red Air Car Wash is a good customer.”
Milner seems to know almost everybody in town. For those who don't know him or are new in town, his cable TV ads run every day. “Everybody watches the news here on the local channel and then they change the station,” Milner says. “It's inexpensive. During hurricane season, we concentrated our spots on the Weather Channel because everybody was watching the storms.”
Milner started his rental business in 1978 after an eight-and-a-half year stint as a plant manager for Coca-Cola. “I got tired of making money for other people,” he says. One day he watched people going in and out of ABC Rental Center for hours. He went in and checked out the business and decided he liked it. The day ABC moved from its facility to a larger place, Milner moved in and began a Taylor Rental franchise, and quickly became one of Taylor's strongest locations.
Milner knew nothing about the business when he first started. “I figured it out real quick,” he says. “Customers would come in and say ‘I need so and so,’ and I'd ask, ‘What's that?’ They'd look around and say, ‘There's one over there; I'll get it.’ I'd ask ‘What do you normally pay for it?’ A guy would answer, ‘$18 a day.’ I'd say, ‘That's fine.’”
When a Taylor regional supervisor visited and watched Milner at work, he advised him he had to take deposits and get peoples' names and addresses and credit information.
“He said, ‘Johnny, the only thing you have on about 2/3 of your contracts is just a name; you're going to lose all your equipment like that.”
“I said, ‘No, I won't.’
“He said, ‘You know all these people?’”
“I said ‘Yeah. This guy, I dated his sister. This guy lives next door to my mother, and this guy lived next door to my brother.’ And on and on and on. He said, ‘You're the first Taylor store I've been to where the owner grew up in the same town.’” In 1985, Milner left Taylor and adopted the Milner Rental Centers identity.
Milner still is on a first-name basis with most of his customers, although the hurricane changed things, with many customers leaving town and many new ones coming in, presenting a unique set of challenges.
“If they come in to my store and are identifiable as with a company, driving a company truck and paying with a major credit card, we don't have a problem with that,” Milner says. “We don't care where they're from. But it's the stragglers, the storm chasers that come in to repair fences, for example. They want to rent power post-hole diggers and air nailers and saws, they come to town with nothing and want to rent it all. They might do five or 10 jobs and then where are they? You can't find them. Those are the types we don't rent to.”
When assessing his losses, Milner also notes the stresses of post-Katrina life. Something simple, like going out to eat — often a necessity since obtaining food supplies is still challenging — can necessitate a two- or three-hour wait because so many restaurants were wiped out by the hurricane. Milner notes the incessant traffic, causing him a new sensation. “I've never had road rage before,” he laughs. “But it's kicking in now.”
Milner — who has satellite branches in nearby Ocean Grove and Biloxi — likely will be facing these kinds of challenges for some time to come as people attempt to dig out of their damage and as many homes and businesses as possible rebuild. Between now and the reconstruction phase, demolition work will increase. The 12 casinos in the Gulfport area have all pledged to rebuild, onshore or offshore, and hotels, restaurants and other businesses have indicated the same.
And at some point, Milner and company won't have to work seven days a week anymore.
Unexpected Hero
David Delk looked out the window of his parents' home, where he and a friend had gone to join them during Katrina, and saw water raging across the driveway. The house was 200 feet from the nearby bayou. He knew right away Katrina was no ordinary hurricane.
As the rising water began flooding the bottom floor, Delk and his friend began grabbing artwork and other items and taking them up to the attic, where they'd soon be taking refuge themselves. But first Delk thought of a 90-year-old couple next door. He made his way across his parents' property, through rising water several feet deep. He carried the woman on his back and went back for her husband to bring them up to the Delks' attic. Half an hour later there was six feet of water in the house.
Delk's father, Charles, started ABC Rental in 1968 and still plays an active role in the business, although David took it over in the mid-90s.
Fortunately for the Delks, ABC's main branch sustained relatively little damage. Its Bay St. Louis branch was filled with four-and-a-half feet of seawater, although it lies two miles from the ocean.
“I'll never forget the day when my dad and I got in the truck and finally made it to the highway and went down 603 to get to our Bay St. Louis store,” Delk says. “There were still cars turned over all the way there and just a few cars were moving, cars piled up on top of each other in the road, and boats everywhere. All of a sudden we saw our store and our manager was sitting out front with his girlfriend. It was almost a tearful reunion, most important because they were safe, and also because our livelihood was still there.”
ABC employees began returning to work almost immediately. “The day after the storm, employees showed up at the front door with their ABC shirts on ready to work,” Delk recalls. “I did lose several. Now business is just booming, but we don't have the people, everybody needs people.”
Delk, like Milner, lost people to temporary higher paying jobs such as clearing trees. The assistant manager of his Bay St. Louis store — ABC has stores in Gulfport, Bay St. Louis and Ocean Springs — moved with his family farther north for a while. Several other employees lost homes. The roof of the company bookkeeper's home blew off, forcing her to move into her garage for the next six months. Delk's parents moved to Gulf Shores by the Alabama border, and instead of coming into the store three times a week are now coming in every two weeks.
However, as Delk says, business has been unbelievable. “We're certainly lucky that we have a business that everybody needs,” Delk says. “So many businesses, like gift shops, just closed up because people left.”
Demand for equipment such as track loaders has been “amazing,” Delk says, and the company just ordered its third shipment of scaffolding since the storm. Even the company's party business, which Delk thought would languish, has been strong.
Like Milner, ABC is wary of some customers. “We've learned not to say that people coming in from out of state are all carpetbaggers by any means, but we're very careful because we've been burned in the past,” Delk says. “But people are very understanding. We're opening charge accounts right and left for people, checking their credit and taking a big deposit from people from out of state.”
Equipment suppliers, Delk says, have been extremely supportive. However, other items, such as gasoline, were far more challenging. “There was no gas whatsoever,” Delk says. “We were lucky we had filled up our tanks right before the storm, just on schedule. So we gave some to our employees, a couple of gallons a day to get them to and from work, and the rest was for our equipment.”
ABC got power back in about two weeks, and after about 10 days at his home. “We didn't have phone service for almost two months, even though I had Internet and cable within a month of the storm.” Delk says. “Cell phones worked, though it was hard to get a signal. I bought more cell phones and I transferred our store numbers to the cell phones.”
A native of the Gulfport-Biloxi area, Delk had been through hurricanes and preparations for them his whole life. “I have a checklist, we board up the windows, we take down the awning, we cover the computers and back up our data,” he says. “Storm after storm, you get kind of jaded, like it's no big deal. Same this time, we laughed and joked about it. Somebody called me and said, ‘It's turned into a Category Five.’ I thought we'd be OK, like always.”
Thinking back to Katrina's awesome power, Delk expresses relief that it occurred during the daytime. “If it had happened at night, there would have been hundreds of dead bodies everywhere,” he says. “I couldn't have rescued those people in the dark with everything that was flying everywhere, with that wind blowing and trees falling in every direction. But I wasn't the only one. Hundreds of others did the same thing, they went into the storm to rescue other people.”
Post-hurricane life takes a personal toll on everybody. Delk talks about losing a number of close friends who have moved out of town for family or work reasons. Even the losses of the simple joys of life people take for granted, such as the destroyed movie theater he'd gone to his whole life, one of only two in town, the other being a distant multiplex with long lines.
“I think everybody's psyche is off-kilter,” Delk says. “Everybody is low, depressed.” Delk threw a well-attended company party to keep up employee morale, gave generous holiday bonuses and wrote personal letters to all employees who stayed letting them know the Delk family appreciated them staying and working hard through the tough times. Delk gave all his employees raises shortly after the storm in appreciation and anticipation of the hard work ahead.
Delk says in addition to help from suppliers who let the company defer payments and offered great terms, ARA's Region 3 sent generators and chain saws and a worker who came and helped. And Delk has turned around and offered customers similar patience. Even four months after the hurricane, customers would come in with pieces of equipment they'd had on rent at the time Katrina hit, but then left town and never had a chance to return.
“We didn't charge them anything,” Delk says. “We were glad they were OK, and glad to get the piece back. Several customers have had problems with cash flow and I'd say, ‘Don't worry, just keep in touch and tell me what happens.’ I may have to go after some people, we are a small business.”
Delk expects rebuilding to be long term. “Just looking around my neighborhood, some people have signed contracts, but nobody has started yet,” he says. “So this is going to affect us for a long time.”
Community Lifeline
Like so many others, Josh DeSalvo of Bay St. Louis, Miss., expected a normal hurricane. He took what protective measures he could at his home and the ABC Rental branch he manages, gathered his two young children and took shelter in the biggest building in town, the power company Coast Electric, where his ex-wife works. He had no idea his home would be rendered uninhabitable, that there would be nearly five feet of salt water inside the rental center and more than six feet outside, destroying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment.
DeSalvo knew that ABC, the only rental center in Bay St. Louis, would be a lifeline for his community. With more than 20,000 people rendered homeless, in a town of fewer than 30,000 people — DeSalvo said only a couple of hundred homes in the town didn't get flooded — the devastated town would desperately need all kinds of tools, equipment and supplies. The evening after the storm hit, DeSalvo came into the rental center and began draining generators to get them ready to power the rental center and to provide electricity for the hospital, all of whose back-up generators flooded.
DeSalvo moved into the store, sleeping on a cot for two months until he got a trailer. He sent his children out of town for a month to stay with his best friend and worked almost around the clock trying to get the store ready to operate.
“It was hard shipping them off and hard for them to be away, but kids didn't need to be around here after the storm, it was terrible,” DeSalvo says. “Unless you were working around here, you didn't need to be in this area, seeing all this devastation.”
Once the water was drained out, he went to work cleaning up the mold. He hired a crew to put in new walls and ABC was one of the first businesses in town to re-open. Three employees came back around the time the store opened. And although he's been able to hire new workers, he still is operating short-handed, although business is running about 60-percent higher than before Katrina hit.
“We worked hard to get the store going,” DeSalvo says. “The community needed us as much as we needed them. I wanted to get everything done quick, to give my guys their jobs back and give the community a store it needed, a lot of people needed things.”
DeSalvo only recently began working on his own house and says he'll need a couple more months to make his house livable again. For quite a while, he and other employees were eating military-issued MREs, until a few more businesses opened, and it wasn't until late December that restaurants in town began re-opening.
ABC in Gulfport doesn't stay open 24 hours a day, but DeSalvo is easily found in case of emergency. “Everybody here in town knows me and knows where to find me,” he says. With all the cleanup and reconstruction work coming to Bay St. Louis, he might expect a lot of sleepless nights.
The Mobile Hub
Jason Thompson didn't expect to spend two months in a hotel when he went down to help out in Mobile, Ala., in advance of Hurricane Katrina.
He had just moved to Birmingham, Ala., from Atlanta, when promoted to division manager for Sunbelt's Alabama and Florida Panhandle facilities. While his wife and baby son waited in Birmingham, Thompson came to Mobile, which was pummeled by winds but escaped catastrophic damages. Sunbelt Rentals, a national chain with nearly 210 locations has two branches in Mobile. The one on the western end of the city lost signage and had doors blown in and other minor damage.
Thompson sat through the storm in a Hampton Inn without power. Toward the end of it, when Katrina headed up the coast toward its tail, Sunbelt mechanics were already on service calls to repair pumps and generators, and other Sunbelt staff powered the store with generators.
“The storm wasn't even through and we had people calling in and we were up and running,” says Thompson.
Sunbelt's customers were severely impacted by the storms, especially the offshore oil platforms. “We rented a lot of offshore air compressors, offshore welders, air winches, the industrial equipment they use on the rigs offshore,” says Thompson. “But the storm propelled us into the market so much and there are so many needs. There's more work than anybody can handle right now.” Sunbelt's pump and power division has been overloaded with demand for dewatering and power generation needs.
Sunbelt staff paid their dues to make it happen, with crews of 24 rotating in from other parts of the country each week, working around the clock to respond to emergency needs. Truckloads brought in equipment daily from suppliers and other facilities.
“Every Sunday a whole new group of guys would come in, everybody would meet here, change all their paperwork, and switch service trucks around,” recalls Thompson. “The other groups went home. We put it out to the whole company asking for volunteers to come work for a week. We told them they'd be sleeping in trailers and would be working or on call 24 hours a day sometimes. After a week, some guys would want to come back, some wouldn't.
“But people were very proud of what they did down here. They felt good about helping people out, getting generators running in all kinds of conditions, powering nursing homes and other places where their help was needed. They were flat beat, but they took pride in what they did.”
The company set up a call center in Charlotte and shipped equipment into Mobile for distribution along the Gulf Coast. The call center took calls, lined up freight and arranged for delivery either at the Mobile branch or directly to the jobsite when possible. Service manager Steve Constantini set up a program to organize service and sales rep Nancy Bunn moved into the area to coordinate sales, remaining until just before Christmas. And Sunbelt is preparing to open a branch in Gulfport with a manager from the Gulfport area.
The 24-hour-a-day frenzy may have died down, but Sunbelt, already a major player on the Gulf Coast, will continue to be so through all facets of cleanup and reconstruction.
