Twister

When a tornado virtually leveled his campus, Brad Johnson turned to a fellow in-plant manager to help him print his college's documents.

When the tornado hit, it hit hard.

Like a chainsaw, it tore through the once-serene campus of Gustavus Adolphus College, tearing up trees, smashing buildings and inflicting some $68 million in damage on the St. Peter, Minn.-based school.

When Brad Johnson got a look at the wreckage the next morning, he couldn't believe his eyes.

"I was in shock," recalls the director of printing services. "I've never seen anything like it. It was one of the hardest moments of my life."

Especially painful was the fact that the roof of his in-plant had been torn apart and the rain was pouring in, drenching his printing equipment—including a new Xerox 5800. Johnson knew that if he were going to save the shop, he and his staff of three full-timers and 14 part-timers would have to act quickly.

"We had to pick this whole shop up and move it—in a week," he says. Equipment had to be dismantled and then shuttled into warehouses. Rain-damaged supplies had to be thrown out.

"We lost about $30,000 worth of paper," Johnson laments.

And then came the toughest task of all—getting the printing done. That was when Johnson learned how important it is to have good neighbors.

Double Duty

Over at nearby Mankato State university, Doug Fenske, director of printing and photocopy services, had heard about Johnson's catastrophe. He offered to do the printing for Adolphus—on top of his in-plant's own workload.

Without a word of complaint, his staff of 12 full-timers pitched in to do the extra work. Fenske rearranged schedules to keep the presses running during breaks. He even ran the equipment himself at times—all in the name of being a good neighbor.

"You just do it," he explains. "You don't even think about it as being a problem."

He didn't think about it as being a way to make a quick buck either. Fenske charged the same prices that his own university customers pay.

"We took no profit on it at all," he says. "You don't want to capitalize on someone else's misfortune. As a neighbor-to-neighbor type thing, you don't take advantage of somebody else's peril."

Getting the additional work done was not easy, Fenske acknowledges. Once classes started at Adolphus, faculty there often discovered that they were missing important documents, and they requested same-day service. Somehow, though, the staff at Mankato State always got it done.

During the three months that Mankato State was printing for Adolphus, Fenske estimates that his shop produced $20,000 worth of work, including folding, labeling and mailing.

"They bent over backwards for us," lauds Johnson.

The employees of Mankato State's in-plant were not the only heroes of this tale, though, Johnson points out. Xerox stepped in to relocate equipment at no charge. PrimeSource dismantled the cutter for free. And Cole Paper made room in its warehouse for the shop's printing equipment, storing it for months.

A disaster like this is the kind of event that could spell the end for an in-plant. Upper management could easily balk at the cost of rebuilding the shop. But not at Adolphus. Since late June, the in-plant has been back on its feet. The equipment has been repaired and a new MBO folder has even been purchased. In fact, instead of considering outsourcing, the college is accelerating the timetable on its preexisting plan to build the in-plant a new facility.

Johnson, in a way, has anticipated a situation like this by tracking his costs over the years and reporting them to management. Having already proven that his in-plant is saving money, he is now being rewarded by receiving support when he most needs it.

As for the rest of the campus, Johnson says the recovery process will take a long time. Other departments have not gotten back up to speed as quickly as the in-plant. And the campus itself, once a serene, wooded site, is still deeply scarred.

"The college has put so much emphasis on nature and the beauty of the campus," he laments. "That's one of our selling points." Now, he says, the few trees still standing have been stripped of bark, and the grass has been torn up. But at least the twister hit during Spring Break, he notes.

Still, it was an event Johnson won't soon forget.

"It was a direct hit on your daily life," he says. "It's not something I ever want to go through again."