September 1, 2020
To Our Customers and Partners:
Our Southwestern Graphite facility located in Dequincy, Louisiana sustained significant damage after a “direct hit” from category 4 Hurricane Laura last week a true “force majeure” type of event. As of today we believe all employees are accounted for and healthy, a blessing for sure, but many are dealing with significant property damage and in some cases the loss of entire homes and property. Our focus has been on ensuring we support our Asbury family members through the initial phases of recovery.
As of today the Southwestern Graphite facility remains closed without power and without water. Damage while significant does not appear to be insurmountable. Our operations team in DeQuincy reports an “army” of power trucks and the National Guard are already very busy in the area. Clean up, operational assessment and repair work will begin with limited crews this week. We are hopeful limited safe operations can resume in the next 2-4 weeks depending on the availability of power and water to the facility.
Our team is working closely to relocate current orders allocated to Southwestern Graphite planned for September shipments to sister facilities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania who have very similar or identical production equipment, identical raw materials and available capacity. Your customer service or sales person will be reaching out to you to notify you of applicable production site changes.
All incoming deliveries from suppliers remain “on hold” until further notice. Please contact your Asbury Supply Chain representatives for further clarification on incoming shipment status.
As always, we will continue to provide updates on our operational status through your typical internal contacts and through notification on our website at asbury.com/about-us/news.
We welcome your warm thoughts and prayers for our Asbury family members effected by the storm. Our people are resilient and strong, I’m confident we will fully recover from this. We remain #AsburyStrong!
Once again, I thank you for the privilege to serve you and your continued patience as we engineer our way through this situation in coming weeks.
Regards
Noah Nichelson
President, Asbury Carbons, Inc.