THE EARTHQUAKE IN ORANGE COUNTY : It Was a Hectic, Profitable Day for Some
The telephone was ringing when Julie Burke walked through the door of Burke’s Glass Service in Orange at 9 a.m. Thursday, and seven hours later it hadn’t stopped. The earthquake that wrought havoc in Whittier and rocked the Southland had shattered windows for miles around.
Burke’s husband had raced off earlier in a van crammed with supplies to board up broken windows, tapping her to handle the phones at the family business. While Burke’s teething toddler cried in the background, the calls kept coming, from Orange County and elsewhere.
“It (the quake) is going to bring in extra money, which is needed,” Burke said. “We’re small and . . . this increases our business about 50%.”
Thursday’s terrestrial boom caused a business boon for some Orange County retailers and added a new twist to an old entrepreneurial adage: Another disaster; another dollar.
Hardware and grocery stores in North Orange County, where the quake’s impact was the strongest, reported a small run on an assortment of supplies, including batteries, canned goods, adhesive tape for securing windows and safety latches designed to keep doors closed.
At Arrowhead Drinking Water in Santa Ana, employees worked extended shifts answering telephone orders for bottled water. One saleswoman said several drivers reported being stopped on the street by residents who wanted to buy bottles from them.
Sparkletts Drinking Water President Douglas Nelson said water trucks making deliveries in Orange County were emptied because of extra demand. And sales efforts were hampered by employees who left work to check on family members’ safety.
Nelson said Los Angeles-based Sparkletts has a marketing effort that promotes bottled water as an earthquake-preparedness product. He said he expected sales to increase as much as 10% in upcoming weeks as consumers cache emergency supplies.
In La Habra, perhaps Orange County’s hardest-hit city, James Hardware sold more than 100 flexible fittings used to connect water heaters to pipes in a homes or businesses. Bud Seyler, an installer at Village Hardware in Yorba Linda, also reported a rash in sales of the connectors, which will replace stiff fittings broken when a quake’s action wrenches water heaters away from their piping.
Seyler said customers also flooded his store looking for brackets to hold shelving to the walls. “But initially they were in to buy tape to prepare windows until people could come out to fix the glass,” he said.
But it was Orange County’s glaziers who were the real beneficiaries Thursday, patching panes in towns like Whittier, Pomona, El Monte and Beverly Hills, for glass installers in those locales were unavailable because of quake-shattered stock, overflow business and overloaded phone systems.
At Buena Park Glass & Mirror, business was so fierce that the owners called installers off of regular construction jobs for emergency duty. Telephone orders came in so quickly that employees were unable to make calls out of the building.
“And we’ve had people come right off the street saying their windows are out,” said Shannon Berry, who does accounting and office work for the firm. “I don’t expect it to slow down at all. . . . This is going to double business. We probably do $500 to $600 in windows per day. . . . We expect to do $1,200 to $1,500 today.”
At Orange Mirror, Screen & Auto Glass, office assistants were pressed into service to aid the company’s seven window installers. Telephones rang steadily, bringing reports of shattered store fronts and automobile windshields broken by falling garage doors from as far away as East Los Angeles and Pomona.
“It’s berserk,” said Jose Tabares, the company’s workshop manager. “It’s tripling business. . . . I feel sorry for whoever the (building and automobile) owners are, but for the glass guys, I think it’s going to be damn good for the time being.”
