Businesses Fill The Need To Prepare For Disaster

May 04--In the days following destructive tornadoes that struck the suburbs of Little Rock and in Tupelo last week, orders for tornado shelters from a Memphis-area company called Tornado Safe went through the roof.

With underground models installed in garage floors leading the way, the company received 41 orders in the Tupelo area alone, said Chris Pritchard, who started the business at Agricenter International in 1999 as a sideline to his Brave Security firm.

In previous tornado seasons, he'd installed 17 shelters at most.

"With these bizarre weather patterns, extreme cold and so forth, people are kind of seeing that these bigger tornadoes can kind of hit anywhere," Pritchard said.

From tornado shelters to standby power generators for homes, to survival kits that can be stashed in closets or car trunks, businesses see demand growing as severe weather raises awareness and loosens purse strings.

The biggest drawback: Spikes in sales as the memory of tornadoes, floods and ice storms wanes with the seasons. "When it's 105 in August and there's no sign of storms, that's the time to get a shelter, so you're prepared, as opposed to now," Pritchard said.

At Benchmark Electric LLC, in Cordova, David Richey said this past winter was great for sales of standby generators. These aren't your small gasoline-powered models using extension cords to supply electricity, but natural gas or propane-fed generators designed to automatically kick in whenever the power fails.

The cost varies, but $6,000 to $7,000 is an average estimate, said Richey, 39, who started as an electrical contractor in 2004 and introduced standby generators in 2005.

"I think the need had kind of always been there," he said. "People haven't noticed that these products are affordable and more readily available."

Not only severe weather, but an aging power grid will aid growth in his industry, Richey said.

Still, the first-quarter earnings reported last week by a major generator manufacturer, Wisconsin-based Generac Holdings Inc., shows the ups and downs of the business.

Generac's residential product sales dropped 35 percent for the first three months of this year compared to last year, when Superstorm Sandy boosted demand. In addition, bitter cold and winter snows in some areas of the country slowed national demand for home standby generators, the product the company is betting on for the future home market.

In Collierville, FedEx pilots and neighbors Ken Nix and Bill Arbeiter are in their 12th year of supplying tornado shelters with a business they named TSW Storm Shelters Inc.

The TSW stands for "two scared wives" left at home when severe weather struck while their pilot husbands were on the job, Nix said.

TSW has installed almost 1,100 shelters, stretching from six on their own cove in Collierville to Little Rock, Nashville, Alabama and Mississippi. They map out their installations and keep in touch with customers, like a woman who emailed last week in Arkansas that she was protected by the shelter they put in, Nix said.

"Our first few years were just educating the public," he said. But weather patterns have definitely changed, he said, and people no longer think the business was a crazy idea.

Nix said that the firm's shelters, made by a company in Oklahoma, cost $6,200 for a larger version installed in garage floors that seats 10 to 12 people. The seasonally driven company had nonstop orders for about 25 shelters last week.

In Oklahoma City, a startup retailer called Homestand Preparation Station opened in March as an outlet for supplies and eduction to prepare for disasters. Investors may spread the model to other tornado-prone areas, including Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee, said Joshua Stratton, an employee.

Stratton called the store a "practical preparation station," offering products ranging from long term-storage food to water filtration and alternative energy sources like solar panels. It also offers classes on preparedness, insurance and the like.

It's a new business model with a cleaner store and high-technology gear in a retail segment that's been dominated by stores with a military surplus feel and heavy offerings of guns and ammunition, he said.

"Our intentions are definitely to bring this tool and this resource to other markets," Stratton said.

Severe weather causing disasters helps raise awareness and spurs referrals, but entrepreneurs also are turning to the advertising and marketing tools of business to sell the products that help people prepare.

At Tornado Safe, Pritchard said he began ramping up for a television advertising campaign early last year and it had run only a few weeks before tornadoes struck in Arkansas and Mississippi.

The message is getting to the mainstream in cities, beyond farmers and rural areas: "Now it's anybody that's got a garage, anybody that's kind of scared of storms," he said.

"We don't want to profit off other people's misery ...," Pritchard said. "We want to be proactive as opposed to reactive when a storm rolls through."

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