National Clothesline

Imagine your neighborhood with all the familiar landmarks missing. No street signs. Trees gone. Buildings collapsed into piles of rubble or vanished altogether. Imagine your familiar surroundings transformed into an alien landscape. And then imagine nightfall — and there is no electricity to illuminate the darkness.

That was Regina Ueltschey’s reality after Hurricane Katrina devastated her hometown of Gulfport, MS, last August. The owner of Imperial Cleaners, she was one of four panelists who told their survivor stories to an audience at the Southwest Drycleaners Association convention in Ft. Worth.

For Ueltschey, life as she knew it ended Aug. 27 when she boarded up her properties in the face of the advancing storm. Since then it has been a “new normal” reality, dealing with the aftermath of the storm that left 231 dead, destroyed 65,000 homes and strew 44 million cubic yards of debris around the state.

“We’re still in recovery,” she said, noting that about two-thirds of the rubble has been picked up, but also picking up has been the crime rate, including construction scams run by people trying to take advantage of the situation.

“Thinking about drycleaning is kind of low on the list,” she said. “Most people are trying to find a place to live.”

Faced with a force of nature like a major hurricane, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. But there are things that can be done to help survive the aftermath. Ueltschey, having lived in the aftermath for six months, has a long list of survival points. Buy extra gasoline. Get plenty of cash on hand. Be prepared to barter and share. Get your insurance policies together and know what all that fine print says. Always be ready to lend a helping hand to friends, neighbors and employees.

And then four things that may be the even more important: be patient; bring a sense of humor; enjoy the small things; and practice tolerance.

At the same time Ueltschey was boarding up in Gulfport, John Walter was boarding up in New Orleans. He and his family departed for Plano, TX, where, like millions around the world, they watched the devastation unfold on television. But when he heard that his brother-in-law’s store had been looted, he headed back to New Orleans hoping to secure the building. There he found some wind and flood damage, but the man-made damage caused by looters was more severe.

“They drove a forklift into the building and got $90 out of the cash registers and stole a few clothes,” he said.

At his own plant, Liberto Cleaners, he found a portion of the roof missing. Salty rain had flooded the building, rusting the equipment beyond use. Walter was back in operation with a washer and dryer within six weeks, but it was six months before he got a drycleaning machine running again.

Getting equipment to work has been a problem. Getting people to work the equipment is a continuing problem.

“We are constantly running ads for help,” Walter said. The demand for labor in New Orleans has made it a seller’s market. Fast-food places are offering $10 to $12 an hour. Walter has seen his payroll increase 60 percent in the post-Katrina environment — paying more for workers who have less experience and have had their own lives shattered. “You need to have a pep rally every day,” he said.

“It’s the same for all cleaners. The whole drycleaning industry in New Orleans has been totally changed,” Walter said.

It seemed the winds of Katrina had hardly died down before Hurricane Rita took aim at the Gulf Coast. With images of Katrina’s devastation still fresh, those in the path of Rita wasted no time getting out of the way. Bill Munro of Beaumont, TX, said he had lived through four hurricanes, but Rita was not going to be the fifth. He evacuated. “It’s not an experience I want to go through again, but if I do, I will be prepared for it,” he said.

One thing he plans to do is install a natural gas powered generator. And, he learned, “Cash is king. Get a good chunk of it.”

After the storm, Munro said he fed employees at his plant for at least 10 days and let people bring their kids to work with them. Some even helped out by folding laundry.

“We’ve had to raises wages and give bonuses,” he said. There is plenty of work to be done. The key is keeping people on hand to do it.

Business is surging in Lake Charles, LA, too. And again, the problem is finding workers. “All small businesses have the same story,” said Robert Guillot of AAA Drive-in Cleaners. Part of the problem is that the city of 70,000 lost 20,000 rental units to the storm.

Guillot was relatively fortunate in that damage to his property was, in his words, “moderate” and he had a generator to supply electricity.

“It’s slowly coming back together,” he said.