Having a back-up generator can help immensely when bad weather happens.
By Howard Riell, Associate Editor
The takeaway from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, which wrecked parts of Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Puerto Rico this year, is neither novel nor surprising, but it is true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, recovery efforts have been ongoing, while recovery after Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Irma in Florida is almost over. During the eye of any storm, however, convenience stores are often a lifeline for local residents who are in need of basic goods.
The key to staying open and serving customers during a natural disaster is maintaining power, which often depends upon back-up generators—a simple, but sometimes-scarce commodity.
FLORIDA SURGE
Stoney Smith, owner, president and CEO of Hudson Food Stores/United Foods, based in Chiefland, Fla., said that almost half of the convenience chain’s 18 stores lost power during Irma. Interestingly, the stores on the coast never lost power, which he called a miracle. “Obviously, it came in a lot further south.”
Smith’s company maintains a couple of generators at stores that are moved to various locations as needed. The most likely locations to require them are usually those along north Florida’s evacuation routes, state roads like U.S. 19, 27 and 41, which run North and South.
The Hudson/United team managed to get a hold of three additional generators at the last minute this year, each of which supplied enough juice to power a store. The chain is currently refitting units with a combination of solar and battery backup power systems to avoid outages in the future, which should obviate the need to scramble to find temporary generators.
As Smith explained, “We won’t have to worry about whether (a rented generator) works or what department it’s got under it. We’ve got one store online with the new system now, and two coming on later this year and the first of next year, so we will definitely be ready for the hurricane season going forward.”
While the temporary generators certainly prevented a great deal of loss, Smith said they also represent an expense. “You have a cost in getting those, and the cost to set them up. What you are really looking to do is to provide some gas, and some power inside. The temporary generators won’t run a lot of stuff; generally speaking, you get about a quarter of the store working.”
DOWN AND OUT
“We closed all of our stores for a couple of days, but we were fortunate enough to get a few of them up and running quickly,” said John Cary, president of Dion Oil LLC, in Key West, Fla., which owns and operates the Dion’s c-store chain. “We have 12 company-operated stores, three of which are still down.”
The dollar damage done by the storms has yet to be calculated, Cary said. “We don’t even have that number together yet, to be honest. We are still having contractors going in and looking at the sites. It’s going to be a very large number.”
Dion Oil’s management team brought temporary generators to several of the chain’s locations.
“When something like this happens, you realize you don’t have enough of them,” Cary reflected. “But we did bring in enough generators and put them in strategic locations. We had to bring in some to our oil company just so that we could get the fuel out to the sites.”
Dion stores lost a tremendous amount of money due to lost sales resulting from the power outage, Cary noted. “You can do nothing; all you can do is watch your product go away. Absolutely, you need the refrigeration to keep going. You need the fuel pumps to keep going. The consumers desperately needed the fuel for their own generators at home, for their own vehicles.”
Cary believes it pays for c-store operators to own their own generators. “We own three currently, but before the next storm comes along hopefully we will have some more.”
He said the best thing about a store having its own generators is timeliness.
“You can bring them right up to the site and get them set up right away,” Cary said. “If you are looking to rent one you just have to hope that whoever is renting them still has them available by the time you get to them. They do disappear quickly.”
Wiring is another challenge an operator doesn’t want to have to deal with during the run-up to an emergency. “Having a generator on site means you have the box in place already, so that you can hook them up. You don’t want to have to go ahead and rewire your entire electrical system when the unthinkable happens.”
ENERGY MANAGEMENT
While energy is of course critical, it is not the only concern. According to Ned Bowman, executive director of the Florida Petroleum Marketers & Convenience Store Association, in many cases generators were all but beside the point.
“The electricity was knocked out, but the argument has always been that in order to run generators you need people at the c-stores,” said Bowman. “When they ordered evacuation of Monroe County and Miami-Dade County, for Dion Oil and Hudson United Foods the No. 1 concern was the safety of their employees; not to sell food and gasoline, but to get their employees out of harm’s way.”
Bowman emphasized that once the evacuation order was given there weren’t a lot of people left in the Keys, yet retailers kept operating.
“Tom Thumb stores borrowed some generators from another association member in Clearwater and brought those down, but resources remained limited going into the Keys. Florida Power & Light (a utility company serving 10 million people) and Duke Energy Florida had the power turned back on quickly nearly everywhere except Naples,” said Bowman. “Some of the RaceTrac stores had power, though a few of them had technical issues with the transfer switches and their computer systems.”
PLANNING AHEAD
Though preparing for emergencies is wise, human nature and budget limitations will remain a tough combination to beat.
“You know, it’s a question of being underfunded and never knowing when you are going to get a hurricane,” Smith observed. “A lot of times there’s a threat but you don’t really lose power, even if it comes through. We were amazed that some of our stores kept power.”
Smith advises operators who can afford it to keep emergency generators on hand at all times, even if they are the smaller, 150-200-watt models found commonly on construction job sites.
Cary said he plans to be more proactive, going forward.
“In retrospect, we would like to get some more (generators) before the next storm comes, but you just don’t know,” he said. “We bought this chain about a year-and-a-half ago, so this was our first full-on hurricane. Definitely, now is the time to start planning.”