THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 22, 1994 TAG: 9409220431
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
You might think that with tent cities popping up in Guantanamo Bay, Zaire, Bosnia and other refugee-flooded parts of the world, the people at Norfolk Tent Co. would be cutting vinyl faster than you can say Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
And you'd be right, at least eventually.
Norfolk Tent and its competitors in the tent-making business have so far been unable to cash in on the demand for new tents. The reason? Tent cities can spring up overnight; tents themselves take a while longer to manufacture.
``This one was really wild,'' said company owner Bob Trainor, holding a fax from the Naval Construction Batallion Center requesting bids for tents. ``We had a day for delivery. One day.''
The U.S. military, the United Nations and humanitarian relief agencies have been caught so off guard by crises in different countries that they can't buy tents fast enough.
``They're looking for anything they can put people under,'' Trainor said.
Norfolk Tent and other tent-makers started receiving faxes soliciting bids for tents about four months ago. Many of the Navy contracts called for the tents to be made and delivered to Gulfport, Miss., within three or four days. It takes about a week to make a large, 60-by-100-foot tent.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service wanted a 100-by-300-foot tent for Cuban refugees in Florida. Norfolk Tent has since been pre-qualified to fill orders for INS, so it doesn't have to wade through paperwork before making a bid.
Then came Haiti. And Rwanda. And an attempt to solve prison overcrowding in Texas by putting low-security prisoners in tents.
``If we were geared for it,'' Trainor says, ``we could've made millions. Millions. But we weren't geared for it and nobody else was either. You can't gear for crisis.''
Norfolk Tent has bid on several crisis-related contracts. One contract would call for the 20-employee Virginia Beach company to make four 60-by-120-foot tents (at $20,000 apiece) and four 40-by-180-foot tents ($16,500 apiece).
Another bid proposes to house African refugees. It calls for separate orders of 7,000 and 3,000 smaller tents. Norfolk Tent could fill those orders, but it may take a couple of years.
``Sure, I can give them to you,'' Trainor told the ordering agency, ``but you give me an order of 3,000 and I'll stop whatever else I'm doing and fill it. We could make 50 a week, but that's all we'd be doing.''
Trainor is sure Norfolk Tent will gain some business from the military and relief agencies' demands for, as he calls it, ``portable shelter.'' But he said he's not about to start making 100-by-300-foot tents, which cost about $80,000, on the gamble that trouble will flare up somewhere else in the world.
The military's tent stockpile will dry up sooner rather than later at this rate, Trainor speculates. Tents used in a refugee situation in one country aren't dismantled and moved to the world's next trouble spot.
Though a good tent can last seven years or longer, the military and relief agencies won't move tents from, say, Somalia to Cuba because they might be infested with parasites.
And military disposal rules require an elaborate and lengthy procedure if the U.S. government wanted to recoup its money by auctioning off the tents.
``Everything that went onto the ground in Somalia stayed in Somalia, or it was going to be destroyed,'' Trainor said. ``It's cheaper for the U.S. taxpayer to burn $200,000 worth of tents than to give them away.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
DAVID HOLLINGSWORTH/Staff
Norfolk Tent workers Samuel G. Stewart, left, and Caezar Ambagan sew
seams into a military tent.
by CNB