Countywide : Hubbub at Postal Hub as Siege Hits

The county’s General Post Office in Santa Ana found itself under siege Monday, grappling with double the normal number of cards and letters and packages in the holiday mail crush.

On a normal day, about 1.5 million pieces of mail come through the facility--officially the Santa Ana Sectional Center--but Monday 3 million cards, letters and packages were processed.

The 2,400 employees dug in for the barrage of holiday mail like seasoned soldiers.

“You know it’s coming,” said Gladys Quan, 50, a postal worker for 21 years. “It’s not like it creeps up on you.”

Nearly every piece of mail posted in the county is processed at the facility, a bustling, noisy postal hub for all but six Orange County cities. On any normal day, the center’s operations are a lesson in controlled chaos. At Christmas, it’s just plain chaos.

Monday, the machines worked nonstop, sorting an endless stream of multicolored envelopes that cascaded down sorting “waterfalls” to waiting mail handlers.

And it wasn’t just the machines that worked nonstop.

“We work 12 hours a day, six days a week, and you got your home to take care of and you got your presents to buy,” Quan said. “I hit the malls right after Thanksgiving.”

Roberta Kriksciun, 31, of Vista, has also worked long hours, including 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, in the three weeks immediately after Thanksgiving. But she, unlike other postal workers, didn’t lose any time away from her husband, Mark.

“He works here, too,” said Kriksciun, a letter sorting machine operator and a Postal Service employee for more than eight years.

Kriksciun’s job is to key-punch in the first three numbers of the ZIP code for every letter that passes before her--one per second. That’s about 500 letters an hour, amounting to more than 6,000 on a 12-hour shift.

“I’ve done this for so long it gives me time to think,” she said. “It makes me think why we’re here six or seven days a week, 12 hours a day. I get a chance to think of what the meaning of Christmas is. It gives me a real good perspective.”

While the increased hours are designed to keep up with the surge of mail, the long shifts can actually decrease efficiency, according to Bill Fisher, a superintendent on the afternoon shift.

“The workload is heavier,” Fisher said. “The employees get a little tired by the end of the night, so our productivity isn’t what is should be.”

Hector Godinez, the Postal Service’s field service director for Orange County, said productivity can also be affected by factors that even advanced technology can’t handle.

“Our bar code readers (devices that electronically cancel stamps) cannot pick up a colored envelope,” he said. “So we’re using our old-time canceling machines that we have to feed by hand.”

Another problem, Godinez said, is that optical character readers--electronic machines that “read” addresses and ZIP codes--can’t read script, which most people use to address Christmas cards.

And despite its “neither rain nor sleet” motto, the Postal Service is still at the mercy of the weather.

“If the planes don’t land (because of bad weather), the mail doesn’t land either,” said Postal Service spokesman Joseph Breckenridge.

HANDLING THE DELUGE

Monday was the busiest day of the year for the Santa Ana Sectional Center of the Post Office, the postal “hub” where mail for all but six Orange County cities is gathered and processed.

Other busy periods, according to spokesman Joseph Breckenridge, are:

April 15--deadline for income tax returns

Mother’s Day

Week before the opening of school--Breckenridge says many stores clog the mails by sending out circulars advertising back-to-school sales.

Week after Christmas--retailers clog the mails with post-Christmas sales circulars.

Miscellaneous information on the Santa Ana Sectional Center:

Area served: 762 square miles

Population served: 1.975 million

Stamped mail processed, avg. day: *1.5 million pieces

Amount of mail processed, Dec. 18: *3 million pieces

Post offices: 22

Stations and branches: 36

Contract postal units: 47

City delivery routes: 1,857

Collection routes: 97

Employees (Sectional Center only): 2,401

Employees (associated offices): 4,373

Total employees: 6,774

* Figures do not include metered mail

Source: Santa Ana Sectional Center, U.S. Post Office