Baptism By Fire: The Road To Rebuilding A Shop

No one wants to get the phone call that Dan Rose received in July.

While enjoying a much-needed vacation with his family, a business owner across the street from his Elite Metal Finishing in Oceanside, CA, called to tell him his shop was on fire.

"In disbelief and shock, I called our General Manager, Sue, to get more information, hoping that no one was hurt and to learn the extent of the damage," Dan says. "It’s under control, I’m told, and no one was injured, so thank God."

In this edition of FinishingAndCoating.com, you will read about how Rose and his team are picking themselves up and rebuilding Elite Metal Finishing, which we just featured a few months ago in their effort to earn Nadcap certification.

Dan is working with Jim Wetherald and the team from Ronatec to restart operations.

But it won't be easy or quick. Like many incidents after fires, they will have to deal with insurance companies on a settlement, which often means everything must remain in its place until adjusters and investigators are through assessing the damage and the cause.

That means tanks will sit until ashes and ruins are walked through and determinations are made. This can be the most frustrating time for those who have had this happen to them, as they see wasted dollars — and possibly customers — flying out the door.

Dan and Jim have promised to document the recovery efforts of Elite Metal Finishing so that everyone can learn from the process and — hopefully — not have to go through this with their shop.

And speaking of fires, we hear about them happening in electroplating shops a lot, and that makes those outside the industry think that it happens all too often. But it doesn't, really. The fact is that fires in finishing shops happen at the same rate as fires in other industries. It's just that sometimes these fires and emergencies get a lot more recognition because fire departments and emergency crews spend a lot more time being careful about going into a building with chemicals, and that often triggers more notoriety in the local news media.

We have written extensively about these fires, and we do so simply to educate others in the industry so that they may be able to learn from what happened.

On the negative side, bringing notoriety to these events can be problematic as the finishing industry is too dangerous to insure. That was the case over the past two years when numerous shops reported to us that their insurance carriers were dropping them from coverage without providing much explanation.

One shop owner theorized that it was because insurance companies were using AI techniques to evaluate which industries were a risk to insure. Because a plating shop fire gets more news coverage than a typical business, the information was skewed to make it sound as if the finishing industry was a higher risk.

I don't know the answer to that, but what I do know is that there probably should be some work done on the finishing industry's behalf to either confirm these theories or help dispel them. That might help insurance companies understand that the inherent danger in running a finishing operation is no greater.

We ache for stories like Dan Rose's, and we wish them a speedy recovery. The goal would be to learn from these types of events, and we thank Dan and Jim for sharing their knowledge during this challenging time.