Attacks alter operations of Maine companies

BANGOR – Maine is open for business, but companies are changing the way they operate and are moving at a slower pace.

The president of Verizon Communication’s Maine operations stood Tuesday morning on the 40th floor of the company’s New York offices and watched as the second jet flew into the south tower of the World Trade Center several blocks away.It wasn’t the first time that Tuesday that Ed Dinan was in the same general area of the terrorists who flew the planes.

“I guess they were in the airport in Portland at the same time I was Tuesday morning,” said Dinan on Thursday, back in his Portland office. “They were hanging around the terminal. I wish I knew.”

They apparently left Portland for Boston just after 6 a.m. Tuesday; Dinan went to New York.

A few hours later, when the plane struck the building, Dinan and other Verizon employees watched in horror. They knew at that point that America was under attack by terrorists.

“I just looked at it,” he said. “You knew there was something senseless and destructive going on.”

Then the Verizon employees went to work. Communications systems were disrupted and Verizon, like other companies in Maine and elsewhere, had to change the way it does business.

Verizon lost a cellular tower on top of a trade center building and many of its wires were destroyed. Calls were rerouted to other systems, but the sheer volume of calls caused line congestion in lower Manhattan, Dinan said.

L.L. Bean, which takes catalog orders from customers via the telephone, said business is down 30 percent to 40 percent because of Tuesday’s events. People are concerned about the victims of the attacks, not shopping, said spokesman Rich Donaldson.

L.L. Bean, which uses FedEx for 80 percent of its shipments, has been informed by the company that products needing to be delivered on the East Coast will be shipped by ground in the next few weeks.

“It may take a little bit longer, but not much,” he said.

Many Maine companies recently have turned to telephones instead of travel to conduct business. At FMC Corp. in Rockland, which is one of the state’s largest exporters, discussions on the company’s budget were held during conference calls because the managers couldn’t physically get together. Air travel was grounded until Thursday.

FMC manager Mike Stumbo said that using the telephone was just as effective as meeting in person, and the company may do that again.

“At least it saves the money of air travel,” Stumbo said.

At Lemforder Corp. in Brewer, a maker of automotive parts, human resources director Ruth Lane said that in the short term, business travel has been canceled. Some meetings won’t be held, but others may be conducted by telephone.

“I think in this day and age people can do so much more teleconferencing until we, as a nation, feel more comfortable,” Lane said.

Calls and e-mails in and out of the New York City corporate offices of Kent Inc., a manufacturer of children’s sleepwear, were slowed because of line congestion, said President Michael Gans.

“It’s not the nicest environment to work in right now,” said Gans, whose office is one block from the Empire State Building. “There’s bomb threats all around.”

Also slowed were shipments of samples of new products to the company’s Fort Kent manufacturing site because of the docking of FedEx and UPS planes, he said.

To get the samples to Fort Kent, the company set up a relay system. Someone drove them from New York City to Boston, another person there took them to Portland, and yet another picked them up and drove them to Fort Kent, Gans said.

With no air-freight service, Lemforder and Rite-Aid had to alert employees that paychecks were going to be late in arriving from other corporate offices. Lemforder’s checks were coming by ground from Atlanta, and Rite-Aid’s the same way from Minneapolis, spokespeople for both companies said.

At American Express Financial Advisors in Bangor, analyst Ed Chase, watched as the building which houses the company’s corporate offices in New York City was on the verge of collapsing Thursday afternoon.

American Express, he said, has offices elsewhere that maintain data bases and no customer data would be lost.

Conducting business in Maine just isn’t the same after Tuesday’s terrorist attacks. The immediacy that engulfs the business world is gone.

“I guess we do need to turn our attention to that,” Donaldson said.

Debbie Rouse, an office coordinator at Advanced Data Systems in Bangor, said anyone not willing to wait a couple of days for shipments “is pretty selfish.”