Boonville (WSYR-TV) -- Superstorm Sandy may not have caused damage around here, but she had a major impact indirectly in many cases.
A Booneville company is seeing it firsthand as people rushed out to stores to stock up on bottled water.
At Nirvana Spring Water, the machines are humming along as fast as they can, turning out bottle after bottle trying to catch up. There was no trickle, but a flood of demand their product before the storm.
"Everybody took the warning and really just started ordering a lot of water to fill their shelves, because of that they pretty much took all of our inventory,” explained Vice President of Nirvana Spring Water, Inc. Mo Rafizadeh.
In the last couple of years, Nirvana shifted its business and now does about 90 percent of its sales with supermarket chains and other stores in the New York metro area. Their water has never been in higher demand than it is right now in that market.
A week ago, Nirvana’s entire warehouse was full of water bottles. Now, there's only a few pallets in the warehouse, not even enough for what's needed to be delivered today.
“So what’s coming off the line is supplementing today’s orders,” said Rafizadeh.
Rafizadeh says Sandy was really the perfect storm in terms of his business – incredibly high demand at a time when they’ve already slowed production for the winter months. Getting the warehouse back up to full capacity is going to be a long process.
"It's going to be a rough next two weeks and I'm getting calls from all different kinds of retailers asking for water that we don't even supply on a day-to-day basis. I'm sure their supplier has run out,” said Rafizadeh.
FEMA has called to make an order from Nirvana for bottled water. The company can’t meet the full demand, but says it’s willing to ship what it can to help.
