Work crews from Baton Rouge-based Turner Industries are in the Lake Charles area today, assessing the damage to their 4,000-person facility there and just trying to support the community that is home to one of their largest offices.
Four trucks left Baton Rouge from Turner’s headquarters this morning carrying pumps, generators and other equipment as well as palettes of food and water to the affected area. A similar convoy from Turner’s Texas facility near Houston was also headed to the region and planned a stop in Beaumont before arriving in Lake Charles.
Since the Calcasieu Parish region is without power or places to stay, Turner Industries President and CEO Stevie Toups says the company’s crews will drive home tonight and then return to the affected area tomorrow morning.
Turner does significant business in southwest Louisiana and east Texas. Toups says the extent of the damage is still not known, though reports indicate the storm’s wrath was not as devastating as some had predicted.
“There are a lot of trees and power lines down but we were very fortunate,” Toups says. “Our facility is OK. The main building is OK. The people we’ve talked to are OK.”
For now, Toups says Turner’s work crews are planning to pitch in and do whatever needs to be done to clean up their site and help their Lake Charles-based employees.
“If there’s a tree down in the road, we’ll pick it up,” he says. “We don’t really know what we’re going into, so we’ll do what needs to be done.”
By next week, Toups expects Turner’s petrochemical industry clients in the area will have a better handle on their needs and will call on the company for help with the cleanup and rebuilding process.
H&E, another Baton Rouge-based company with Lake Charles facilities, also appears to have emerged from the hurricane relatively unscathed.
Chairman John Engquist says the company’s Lake Charles location and its inventory of heavy equipment was not damaged. The 30 or so employees are also “doing fine,” he says.
“We still have not been able to get to our store to see what it looks like, but everybody seems to be OK,” Engquist says. “The storm surge was not near as bad as they were predicting. We’re more worried about Cameron Parish. That’s got to be a mess.”
