Fleetwood to Make Temporary Homes for Storm Victims

Anita Gonsalez, after spending 18 years on the assembly line at Fleetwood Enterprises Inc., can spot a market upswing.

Production lines at Fleetwood are about to hit overdrive after the Riverside-based company received an order Tuesday from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for 7,500 travel trailers and 3,000 prefabricated homes to provide temporary housing for Hurricane Katrina victims.

“This is good for us, for job security,” Gonsalez said Wednesday, while overseeing installation of air-conditioning units in travel trailers at Fleetwood’s Rialto plant. “But at the same time, I feel so sad for the people who were caught in this.”

Fleetwood said the $170-million FEMA contract was the largest in its history, and its stock rose 4% on Wednesday to a nine-month high of $12.44, up 46 cents.

In recent years, job security has been tenuous at Fleetwood. The company has been hit hard by rising gas prices, slowing demand for RVs, and by low interest rates that led consumers to choose site-built homes over pre-fabricated units.

“Certainly it helps us,” said Fleetwood Chief Executive Elden Smith, a 30-year veteran, who came out of retirement in March to run the company. But he downplayed the longer-term effect of the special order.

“We have been on a successful track in the last couple of quarters anyway,” he said.

Fleetwood has been restructuring, and this month posted a $29.6-million fiscal first-quarter loss as it sold most of its retail manufacturing outlets and its finance unit to concentrate on sales of campers, motor homes and manufactured housing.

Getting a temporary boost from a government order is nothing new for the company. Last year, Fleetwood provided about half of the emergency housing purchased by FEMA after four hurricanes hit Florida.

After FEMA uses the prefab homes and trailers for temporary housing, it sometimes sells them at low cost to the people living in them.

Work on the FEMA contract will not start at Rialto for three weeks, said plant general manager Ron Richardson.

Fleetwood needs to deliver the manufactured homes by Nov. 30, and the trailers by the end of the year. To meet those deadlines, Fleetwood will add nearly 100 temporary workers to its 300-person assembly line in Rialto, Richardson said. New hires will be paid a starting wage of $9.75 an hour.

The 32-foot-long FEMA trailers will have two bedrooms, a foldout sofa, an air conditioner and a kitchen with a larger-than-usual refrigerator and a microwave. Unlike the standard Fleetwood trailers, the FEMA models will be made to hook up plumbing and electricity to centralized systems in trailer enclaves.

Meanwhile, plant workers on Wednesday were producing Fleetwood’s Gearbox line of trailers aimed at the off-road RV crowd that sell for as much as $28,000 and are equipped with storage space and ramps at the back for motorcycles and four-wheeled ATVs.

“They are nice, eh?” said Gonsalez with pride as she showed off the fiberglass vehicles.

Workers moved quickly among the dozens of trailers in various states of completion, deftly skirting around stacks of sofas, cabinets and microwave ovens waiting to be installed. The staff wore earplugs to stave off the sound of electric saws and pneumatic staplers in the 60,000-square-foot plant.

On the production line, Edith Diaz, 40, who oversees installation of the trailer sidewalls and hulls, said the FEMA order was a chance to do something that will benefit the Katrina victims.

“This is our part,” Diaz said. “We are proud of what we can do.”