Katrina breeds storm of activity in the Fort

By Cherry Sokoloski
Fossil Creek Current

It's lunchtime, and line workers striving to restore power on the Gulf Coast are hungry. Trouble is, not only is New Orleans swamped, but the national catering companies are too.

Some lost their facilities in the storm, and others are simply overcome by demands they can't meet. Restoring power to the Gulf Coast is a massive job, with thousands of workers accompanying truckloads of new power poles, transformers and power lines. Feeding all these workers is no small task.

Enter Sackits Catering and Sackits Emergency Services, a Fort Collins firm. Owners Dale and Cindi Meyers were asked to help out the week after the hurricane. They geared up quickly and were able to sack 5,000 lunches a day for southern catering companies, who in turn fed power company employees working in Louisiana and Mississippi.

To get the job done, Sackits set up an assembly line in an East Mulberry Street warehouse. Twenty to 30 temporary workers staffed the three-line project each day. Completed lunches were loaded onto a refrigerated truck. Sackits sent two truckloads of lunches to the Gulf Coast, for a total of 27,000 lunches.

It was a community effort, Dale Meyers emphasized. Other local caterers made sandwiches, and many suppliers kicked into high gear to provide the rest of the lunch items. "Everyone has been very interested in helping out," Meyers said, "and the temporary workers have been great."

Sackits' prior experience was also a help. The firm contracts with the federal government to provide food to wildfire crews, and in that capacity it has served three meals a day for as many as 2,500 firefighters at a time. It worked the Picnic Rock fire as well as big fires in other states. In addition, Cindi Meyers was formerly in charge of food for firefighters with the Colorado State Forest Service.

There's no southern-style barbecue in the lunches from Sackits, but the new clientele has had an effect on the business. Meyers is constantly on the phone with one southern caterer or another, and one of those colleagues told him recently, "You're starting to get a southern drawl."