Home Depot command center gets stores stocked for hurricane

Gas cans, gas cans, gas cans. And generators, generators, generators.

Those were two of the 11 products that a team of Home Depot merchants was buying up like crazy this week in preparation for Hurricane Ike’s predicted landfall in the United States.

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JESSICA MCGOWAN/jmcgowan@ajc.com

Employees work in front of Home Depot regional maps inside the command center at the chain’s headquarters in Atlanta. They coordinate moving supplies such as plywood, generators and tarps into areas that could be hit by storms.

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HURRICANE HELP
Trucks deployed by Home Depot to restock stores:

• Gustav: 500 pre-storm, 300 post-storm
• Hanna: 200 pre-storm
• Ike: 500 to South Florida pre-storm followed by 500 to the U.S. Gulf Coast

— Source: Home Depot

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The merchants were not only buying them up but arranging for them to be put on trucks that would deposit them in warehouses within a several-hour drive of Hurricane Ike’s predicted strike zone in Texas.

Parked in a renovated meeting room at company headquarters in Atlanta is Home Depot’s “command center” for natural disasters.

The $77.3 billion company takes disruptions from hurricanes seriously.

“Hurricanes are major events for The Home Depot,” said company CEO Frank Blake on Monday at a Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast. “We’re tracking the hurricanes to see where they are going to determine the supply chain. It’s a very strong company value that we will be the last out and the first in.”

The company’s goal: for the stores to never run out of disaster supplies before or after a hurricane.

He called the command center “a frenzy.”

Organized chaos may be more like it.

The room is set up like a lecture hall facing two giant television screens flashing the Weather Channel, MSNBC and CNBC, with four smaller screens on either side.

The storm command center was built in 2005, before the hurricane season that coincidentally brought Hurricane Katrina.

On Tuesday, more than 30 people led by “disaster captain” Corky Martin and Bob Puzon, vice president of merchandising for the southern region, were busy taking orders from stores from Louisiana to Texas.

Hurricane Ike at the time was expected to make landfall somewhere between Louisiana and Mexico on Friday night or Saturday morning.

The third hurricane in as many weeks meant that many of these people had been working for three weeks straight, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., taking orders from stores in the paths of hurricanes and making sure they never ran out of tarps, flashlights, batteries, gas cans, generators, plywood, bottled water and other essentials.

Puzon said many of the employees have worked in Home Depot stores and can empathize with how it feels to be out of stock during an emergency. He said he tells them to go home, but they won’t.

On the flip side, he said, there are no replacements for the 11 key product merchants so those folks, like Shaun Martin who buys generators, are there seven days a week. “Martin is the most popular guy,” said Puzon.

In fact, Blake said generators caused him a bit of consternation last week as Hurricane Hanna threatened the East coast.

“I lived this very intensely,” said Blake. “My son is a [Home Depot] store manager in Wilmington, N.C., which was in the path of the hurricane. I was getting e-mails from him every other minute, ‘Where’s the generator truck? Where’s the generator truck?’ “

For Hurricane Ike, added Blake, “it’s a marathon.”

He said as the hurricane has changed paths, Home Depot has been “racing generators from Wilmington to Miami. Then the storm moves again so it’s nope, move them to Louisiana.”

And that moving around is the job of the command center.

Seven giant maps plastered on the walls show the locations of stores and the major highways to them.

Four banks of desks are filled with laptops and merchants, while nine “purchase order” terminals process the orders.

Up front, a large screen displays Home Depot’s proprietary software called “Pulse.” It shows real-time information about what was ringing through stores at that moment in the predicted hurricane strike zone.

Puzon said the software can tell Home Depot within minutes if a store’s check-out systems are down because of a power loss.

But this was just one of four rooms set aside at headquarters to deal with disasters.

Next door was Chris Canoles, “operational captain” (official title: senior director of environmental health and safety).

Canoles is responsible for closing down and reopening stores, as well as making sure repairs are made quickly if stores are damaged. He also makes sure his staff is fed and taken care of.

For Hurricane Gustav, he had 12,000 “ready-to-eat” meals and 72 pallets of sports drinks and snacks (bought at Costco) trucked overnight to seven stores in Baton Rouge because the area had lost power. The meals fed Home Depot staffers so that they could work and keep the stores open.

His other duties include pulling strings with government agencies to let Home Depot sell, for example, unapproved gas cans in Texas.

Home Depot’s supply of approved gas cans has run out, but gas cans are one of the most popular items purchased during hurricanes.

Canoles’ team got Texas Gov. Rick Perry to sign an order temporarily allowing a different kind. The team also donated 25 generators to the state of Louisiana during Hurricane Gustav. Canoles also must monitor when a state of emergency is called for counties that could get hit by hurricanes. As soon as that happens, Home Depot must freeze prices. The merchants have to negotiate that with suppliers.

In another room, Jeff Wagner, a former Navy captain, handled logistics, how to get the goods to the stores.

Puzon said Wagner, five years retired from the 7th U.S. Naval Fleet in Singapore and four years with the Home Depot, has dramatically improved logistics by finding empty big-box stores in which to “stage” goods during hurricanes to be closer to the affected areas. The saving could be as much as 11 hours on transit time, Puzon said.

That has made a big difference, he said, because in some locations a whole truckload of generators, or 250 units, and a few thousand gas cans could sell out in as little as 25 minutes.

Wagner said he learned in the Navy to think about “time and distance” goods have to travel to get to their destination. With hurricanes, Wagner is often working against a moving target.

That’s why Home Depot has hired a weather consulting agency, Early Alert, that gives the company at least three updates a day on where the hurricanes are heading.

A fourth room houses a human resources team that will deal with staff who have to be evacuated, or get staff from other regions to work at stores after a hurricane.

On Tuesday, that room was empty. But come Friday, when the hurricane is expected to hit, the team will be in full swing.