Businesses weather Hurricane Harvey with Cat® Rental Power

Contingency plan

Businesses that secured Cat® Rental Power before the storm hit not only helped themselves, but were able to help others in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

Scott Milligan, President, Energy Rental Solutions (ERS), a Cat dealer in Houston, says that oil and gas companies have contingency plans in place in lieu of a storm.

“We do hurricane plans down here in Texas and on the Gulf Coast, so many of our customers, particularly in the oil and gas industry, have emergency plans in place.” Milligan said. “When a tropical storm is brewing in the Gulf they start to make some preparations. So we had some plans in place already with a number of customers.”

But not everyone has a backup generator or a contingency plan in place. The reality is, the majority of businesses are in race against time to find a generator and keep the power on before a storm hits.

Northeast of Corpus Christi, a grocery store in the small community of Woodsboro was in the eye of the storm.

“It was scary, we could hear the ceiling joists popping in the roof,” said Cody Tuttle, of Tuttle’s Grocery & Market. “We had plywood over the plate glass windows in the front, but they were flexing back and forth with the pressure from the storm. It was a long, long night.”

Tuttle made 60 phone calls before he was finally able to secure a rental generator set through Holt Cat. With the help of a local electrical contractor, Tuttle Market disconnected from the grid a day before Harvey hit, and ran continuously on generator power through the storm and for twelve days altogether.

 “With Caterpillar’s help, we were basically the only ones in the county that were really prepared for this,” said owner Stanley Tuttle. “I’ve been thinking about buying a generator for several years but just never made the investment. “But I knew that I better have some backup power if I wanted to keep from losing thousands of dollars of inventory.”   

In the wake of the storm, nothing was open in Refugio County. Gas stations were left in ruins, while fast food restaurants were destroyed.

“That Saturday afternoon we were able to open up and people who went without electricity for 18 to 20 hours were able to come here for lunchmeat, bread, water and other foodstuffs,” Cody Tuttle recalls. “We were the only store open in the whole county. We had lines down both aisles.” 

Transportation planning

Contractors working on the $815 million State Highway 288 toll road expansion in Houston utilize large office trailers that are not connected to the power grid.

“We have a primary and a backup generator, so we were prepared,” said Junior Medrano, an equipment foreman with Almeda-Genoa Constructors, a joint venture building the toll road on the south end of Houston. “We were ready to go.  So if anything bad happened, which it did, we had backup to go ahead. Even our primary generators never failed us.

“Cat dealer ERS did help us out, Medrano said. “They had one of their guys come in here and just go ahead and run all the wiring, and it was pretty much plug and play. All we had to do was just make the phone call and ERS took care of everything else.”

Continued operation of a batch plant is very important to the 288 project, as day in and day out, concrete is constantly being delivered to the jobsite, notes Rene Sanchez, assistant equipment manager with Almeda-Genoa Constructors.

“For the duration of the hurricane, the batch plant never went down because of the support of the Cat rental generators,” Sanchez said. “And neither did our work trailer compound.”  

In Victoria, Texas, auto dealer Mac Haik Ford was able to resume selling cars the Thursday after the storm.

“A lot of people needed some vehicles to get back going, so we’re very fortunate to be able to help them,” said sales manager Greg Gunn. “So it was really nice to be able to get up and going and have power, even though businesses around here didn’t get the power turned back on for another four or five days.

“Because we had power from our Cat rental generator, we actually were able to produce and store ice and store different things here,” Gunn said. “We ended up serving as a donation drop for some of the victims and that had been affected by the hurricane.

Storm preparedness

With the intensity and frequency of tropical storms in 2017, businesses are re-thinking their storm preparedness plans.

“We have protocol on what to do before a disaster hits, and that’s protecting the store and doing certain things like moving vehicles,” Gunn says. “But one thing that really needs to be addressed is having power ready to go, having a contract in place so we’re on standby and have a relationship with a company that can provide a rental generator if a storm is going to hit—because we forget how much we need the power.”

Next time a hurricane or tropical storm hits, Stanley Tuttle plans to be ready. He knows he was fortunate to have rental power at the ready this time around, both to save inventory and serve as an emergency food source.

“Immediately after the storm, people here were in dire need,” he says. “And without Holt Cat’s help, we wouldn’t have been able to help the community the way we did.”