Hobart printer hit by flash flooding

The Snap franchise on Macquarie Street in Hobart city was one of many businesses impacted by the Hobart flash flooding over the weekend.

The federal government has declared the flood to be a natural disaster, while insurance claims coming in have topped $20m in damages and are still rising.

Other Hobart printers ProPrint spoke to seemed to escape the worst of the floods.

Kyron Johnson, managing director of Snap Hobart says, “There is damage to stock and to customer finished work. There was a bit of flooding in our production room, around a couple of inches. There is damp in the carpet and parts of the ceiling have fallen in.

“It is hard to say how the insurance will evaluate the costs. There is the cost of goods lost, the cost to replace the goods. We had to reproduce work, so we cannot produce other work. There is also cleaning, which is being done by our staff and we have brought in some contractors, so there will be costs associated with that.

“It is mostly working in an environment that is not as conducive.

“It hit on Friday evening and there was 120mm dumped in Hobart over 24 hours, which I do not think has ever happened before, not with that sheer volume.

[Related: Brisbane printers suffer from power outage]

“Where we are is on Macquarie Street and the bottom of the road was completely flooded, cars were swept along. The water came off the mountain and it had nowhere else to go. It was not as bad where we are. Our roof is completely flat, so there was nowhere for the run off to go, which also was an issue.

“Friday was right off. It was difficult, we had a job working on football records and we were focussed on that. The downtime as a result of the flood meant we could not finish it and we had to pass on the rest of the work to another printer.  

“It is a tight business anyway, this certainly did not make things easier.

“It is not just water, it is also the dampness. There are two things paper cannot handle, fire and water. Paper cannot handle damp, you cannot run it through the printers, or through the collators and you cannot give it to customers in that state.

“The carpet is also still damp. It is hard to get a carpet cleaner at the moment, they are busy looking after everyone else so it is a matter of waiting in line. You can feel the damp creeping up your legs and there is a bit of a smell from it.

“We are up and running now. We have a skip bin and we are throwing out all of the water damaged product. The clean up should wrap up today but we are fully operational.

“Our staff are okay with it, they understand these things happen. At the end of the day, we have the understanding and support of our customers.”

ProPrint talked to several other printers that were thankfully not affected including Pumpkin Prints, and Monotone.

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