Industrial cleanup supplies B2B merchant New Pig experienced some delivery service delays – mostly from one to three days — last week due to Superstorm Sandy according to Tony Deely, the Tipton, PA-based company’s distribution center director.
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Deely said service delays began last Monday in the storm-affected areas from Virginia north to New York City. Pickup and delivery service for all carriers was limited in many areas and already stopped in the worst storm areas, Deely said, and ports of Baltimore, Chester, PA, and New York were also closed. Deely said New Pig both imports and exports goods.
By last Tuesday the list of storm-ravaged areas had spread north to include Connecticut and Massachusetts, and west to West Virginia due to the snow there, Deely explained. Carrier terminals in Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania were closed and areas outside the storm experienced some delays when freight stopped moving out of the affected areas. The port of Chester reopened Tuesday afternoon, but the other ports remained closed.
Deely said by last Wednesday the carriers were able to open most of their terminal operations, but service to the severely hit areas along the East Coast and in West Virginia was “just about non-existent due to ongoing power outages, flooding, heavy snow and the horrible damage.”
By last Thursday, Deely said, the list of service delayed areas was much smaller.
Deely said all of New Pig’s carriers were operating all of their terminals by Friday, while ports in New York were scheduled to resume service this week. New Pig didn’t have to cancel any work shifts and contact center and online orders were uninterrupted.
“We had a few inbound deliveries delayed a few days and a few exports delayed a day or two, but aside from the worst days of the storm, we were pretty much business as usual,” Deely said.
Deely praised the parcel and freight carriers for moving resources into areas to clear up packages and freight that couldn’t be delivered early last week and “they seem to have plans in place to manage the deliveries they are holding until the worst areas are opened up for them to get into.”
Jim Tierney ([email protected]) is a senior writer for Multichannel Merchant. You can connect with him on Twitter (TierneyMCM) and LinkedIn, or call him at 203-358-4265.