ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609300007
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: FAIRLAWN
SOURCE: MARK CLOTHIER STAFF WRITER
If you've ever put metal in a microwave or overcooked a batch of Jiffy-Pop popcorn, you know what Bill Earle's been smelling lately.
Earle manages The Carpet Shop and Powers Fence Co., businesses destroyed in an early morning fire Sept. 14 along with The Tax Service and Schewel Furniture.
Authorities said the fire started accidentally near a secretary's desk in The Carpet Shop. Investigators think it might have been started by a nearby space heater that was either left on or was defective. Damage is estimated at $1.5 million.
Save for the strip center's white brick facade, the mostly metal building was totaled in the blaze that was hot enough to wrinkle a nearby Kroger billboard, perched some 50 feet above U.S. 11.
Six days later, the site still reeked of tar and burned metal.
But for small business owners recovering from a devastating fire, smell sits low on the list of concerns.
Ranking higher are things such as lost sales, scrambling to fill orders despite ruined inventory, appeasing customers whose orders are delayed, trying to recover and retrieve records, and just plain getting back in business.
Most businesses, however, carry commercial insurance policies that cover them in case of most disasters, excluding floods and earthquakes, said John Brown, a commercial insurance agent with Blacksburg's Leonard L. Brown Insurance agency.
Most policies, Brown said, have a feature that works almost like unemployment insurance, compensating a company for lost revenue for up to one year.
Six days after the fire, Earle's employees were working to reopen, laying carpet in their temporary home next door, in a building that formerly housed Fairlawn Amusement and Snack Bar.
Next door, a man using a school-bus-yellow track hoe was maneuvering its claw to pluck 30-foot corrugated metal shards of what used to be The Carpet Store's roof from the rubble. He's placing the remains of the store about as neatly as one can place twisted oblong strips of metal in a pile toward the rear of the lot, where the carpet store's warehouse stood one week earlier.
"We've been at it," Earle said.
The company plans to reopen at a permanent rebuilt site next door by January. Because the company sends its business records to the Roanoke branch every day, workers were able to focus energy on their temporary 2,000-square-foot home the first week after the fire.
So far, they've painted the gray walls white, laid carpet and brought in new samples. Four days after the fire, phones and faxes were working. Seven days later, Earle was back in business.
"It hadn't hurt us business-wise too much," Earle said. "It's just a process of moving. We called all our customers and they all allowed us to reorder."
Earle said none of the 30 or so customers who were expecting orders canceled despite the seven to 10 days to reorder.
"The customer's patience was appreciated," he said. "We've been here in business 29 years, and I guess they felt they had a fairly well-established business.
Bonnie Benson, who has run The Tax Service from this U.S. 11 location since 1973, also has a well-established business.
Benson has only recently begun to figure and file electronic tax returns. So some three-quarters of her 1,000-client's returns are still computed the old-fashioned way - on paper. The books are kept on computer disks.
Firefighters were able to save her computer as well as seven of her 19 file drawers before the smoke choked them out. Everything else is toast.
Benson and her daughter, Vicky Martin, spent the first week picking out new office furniture for their temporary home in the same strip center into which the carpet and fence shops moved. Wednesday they reopened. Wednesday it was delivered.
To recreate her customer's tax information, Benson will have to rely on well-organized customers who kept copies of past returns.
"It's very disastrous," she said. "Especially in my kind of business where paper is your business. Most businesses, you can just call and order new stock but if you lose paperwork, you can't just order more.
"This is something that's going to take a lot of work to get ready for the tax season this year," she said. "But we feel we can do that and be ready to go when January 1 rolls around."
The biggest post-fire headache for Schewel Furniture Co. was timing, the bad kind.
One week after the fire came the company's biggest sale of the year. If a customer buys a certain amount of furniture they get some free. The store expected weekend sales around $60,000.
Manager Linda Bugg said the store plans to reopen this week on Third Avenue in Radford in the building formerly occupied by Grand Piano & Furniture. The move is expected to be temporary, she said.
"We're all really eager to get back in business and to take care of our customers. Just the fact that we've been unable to do so for so long has been a struggle," she said of the store's two-week interruption because of the fire.
LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN KIM/Staff. Bonnie Benson (right) and her daughter,by CNBVicky Martin, in front of their fire-damaged business. color.