Hurricane Sandy Coverage: Report from Colonial Electric Supply
With branches in eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, Delaware, and Brooklyn, N.Y., Colonial Electric Supply covers much of the area that caught the worst of the storm. Steve Bellwoar, the company’s president said damage was “minimal” near the Colonial headquarters in suburban Philadelphia, but that some of its other locations are in areas with widespread power outages. He said 80% of his employees working at headquarters were able to make into work today, but estimates that only 50% of the company’s employees at the New Jersey and New York branches could get in.
“We were in half day Monday and officially off Tuesday but the damage near our headquarters in King of Prussia was minimal so we brought some people in yesterday afternoon to service our emergency service providers,” said Bellwoar.
“In New York City it’s a mess, although our location up there is fully operational today. We have four locations in South Jersey where there are still widespread outages, including our southern most branch in Cape May, N.J. Around Pennsylvania, plenty of power outages but not as bad. Most Pa. employees are in at work today.”
He said they have been selling transformers, aerial cable, fuses and “typical things that get blown out.” “We are probably going to sell a lot of load centers for flooded basements at some point. The shore community is not populated this time of the year so they have some time to rebuild and get back to normal.”
Bellwoar says it’s a bit early to assess issues with vendors’ deliveries. “Luckily not too many of them are in South Jersey or New York City,” he said. “I bet the North Jersey guys will have trouble."
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Jim Lucy Blog
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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.