Like many other residents on the East Coast last fall, Joe Levy found himself on high alert the morning of October 29th. Hurricane Sandy was bearing down on the Mid-Atlantic and cities for hundreds of miles were awaiting instructions from the weather service. Levy is president of Thunderball Marketing, a distribution company that deals in electronics, including DJ and pro audio products like iDance, DJ Tech Pro, Jamminpro, and many other MI wares. His warehouse headquarters are a comfortable distance from the shore in Avenel, New Jersey. Nevertheless, he heeded the warnings of authorities that morning and, at noon, sent the whole company home to safety.
“We got a call at five in the evening later that day,” he says. “The power was out. Sandy was here.” Levy spent the rest of night literally in the dark, with no access to cameras to monitor the warehouse. He says that he and coworkers returned to the warehouse the next morning to find everything ruined. Much of the inventory was toppled and washed out by the surging flood that had devastated so much of the rest of the coast.
Within four days, Levy was shipping any orders he could, determined to get the business back on its feet as soon as possible. The federal government had promised aid to New Jersey, FEMA was on its way, and the Small Business Association was preparing to make emergency loans.
Now, eight months later, help still hasn’t arrived. Though the doors are open and orders are still moving, Thunderball’s volume is down from $60 million to $6 million. Manufacturers, Levy says, have been generous with extensions and new orders. But time is running out. “We need help,” he says.
Thunderball’s warehouse is located two miles from Arthur Kill, the water between Carteret, N.J. and Staten Island, but the storm’s 20-foot surge still reached the warehouse through what’s believed to be a drainage backup. When Levy first saw his facility, he says it simply looked as if it had been vandalized. There was no water to be seen.
“It looked like two million gallons went in and two million gallons went out, within a six hour period,” he says. “Everything was turned over and looked like someone had ransacked the place. But when you actually put your foot on the floor, it was wet. Everything was destroyed – the desks and offices and the phone system and the computer system were all destroyed by this salt water.”
The warehouse suffered a $7 million loss of inventory that day. Levy and his crew wheeled it all out into the parking lot to dry.
The real troubles started to pile up later, though. FEMA officials stopped by, but told Levy there was nothing they could do. The SBA refused to offer a loan. “They didn’t think we could survive this kind of a beating,” Levy says. And Thunderball had no flood insurance – after all, the warehouse was well out of the established flood zone.
When Levy has been able to reach his insurance company for help, the results have been disappointing.
“We were in mediation between the insurance company, the state of New Jersey, and us, to pay us for computers, and you should have seen the battle for that,” he says. “We have $418,000 in computers, and they want to pay only $100,000. They’ve been getting premiums for 38 years at $100,000 a year and when it comes down to one claim, they don’t pay.”
Appeals to state and federal government have so far proven fruitless. Levy says he’s logged months of ignored phone calls and emails to offices of New Jersey governor Chris Christie and President Barack Obama, going so far as to mail multiple copies of the 500-page denial letters that he’s received from his insurance company.
“The state got $1.7 billion [federal funds] for relief from Hurricane Sandy, but again, nobody’s helping us,” Levy says.
On the other hand, Thunderball’s relationship with manufacturers has remained positive, with nearly every one of them staying on board with the company throughout this challenging year. Levy points to loyal suppliers like Peavey, Yamaha, Roland, Boss Audio, Rockford Fosgate, RCF, BNC, Harman Group, and Pioneer as having been big helps in maintaining operations with as many customers as possible.
But with such a loss of inventory, it’s still a steep uphill climb. “For a lot of people, if you would have walked in that morning and seen what we saw, you would have closed the door and filed Chapter 7. But we didn’t do that to our vendors.
“Someone who’s in our position for 38 years doesn’t just walk away.”
