New Jersey manufacturer Atlas Bronze learns tough lessons from power outage
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Superstorm Sandy left at least one New Jersey company in the dark for 10 days. “We hadn't really experienced anything like that, so we didn't have any backups in place and we didn't have any generators,” said Josh Smith, warehouse operations manager at Atlas Bronze, a unit of Maranatha Now Inc.
The power outage after Sandy struck the copper, bronze, brass and iron distributor and manufacturer's main facility and warehouse in Trenton, N.J.
The company did not have contingency plans to respond to the outage, Mr. Smith said. “It wasn't even on our minds.”
And the outage left the company unable to perform rudimentary tasks. “We couldn't even get the garage door open,” he said. “We couldn't really receive material because we couldn't get the forklifts out.”
But the company avoided major losses by having its suppliers fill customer orders.
Still, Atlas Bronze said it will “absolutely” develop a plan to handle future supply chain disruptions and a backup generator will be part of the plan.
“We need some way to keep our machinery up and running so that we don't have to expose ourselves,” Mr. Smith said.
“You're going to go down. One way or another, something is going to happen,” he said. “You need to be prepared.”
John W. Kennedy, Morris Plains, N.J.-based chief operating officer for nonprofit New Jersey Manufacturing Extension Program Inc., said Sandy's widespread effects on the state's 11,000 manufacturers was “staggering.”
After meeting with more than 1,000 manufacturers, NJMEP found that about 22% were “severely damaged” in losing more than two weeks of production. About 90% lost about a week of production, he said.
