Update on Sodexo response to the Southern California Fires
From CEO, George Chavel, on our response to the Southern California Fires:
Dear Team:
I want to update you on the admirable way our teams responded to the fires in Southern California. The fires, which started on October 21 and were fueled by the Santa Ana winds, destroyed more than 500,000 acres and 2,000 homes. A half million people were temporarily evacuated. The worst is over and things are settling back to normal.
Fortunately, all of our people are safe. Three employees lost their homes. They have already applied for and are receiving assistance from the Employee Disaster Relief Fund. Thank you for your generous contributions to the Fund, which supports our people in need and especially in times like these.
The impact on our business was minimal, all things considered. Many of our accounts were temporarily affected, including several of our mess halls at Camp Pendleton and Miramar; schools in San Diego, Chula Vista, and San Isidro, corporate clients such as Johnson & Johnson, Nokia, Hewlett Packard, and Pfizer; Pepperdine University in Malibu; St. Paul's senior & assisted living center; Sharp Health System and Alvarado Hospital.
Let me say how proud I am about how our people responded. From our operators on the ground to our support staff in the region and at headquarters, we performed well.
First, there was excellent communication with local teams to ensure their safety and welfare and with our clients to meet their needs. At open locations, our people helped evacuees from the fires, offering food, drink, and hospitality, and some even housed evacuees in their own homes. Our people delivered caring support under trying circumstances. Consider:
At Camp Pendleton, a marine commander wrote, “My unit was displaced last week to Area 21 due to the fires in Camp Pendleton and I was in charge of making sure that my Marines had chow. All I had to do was call in to the staff at 21 Area Mess Hall with my request and I had no worries that my needs would be met-exceeding my expectations. The staff was friendly and enthusiastic and I honestly felt that they cared about me and my Marines. We all appreciate the hard work they put into making sure we were taken care of.”
Sharp Health System in San Diego County received 140 evacuated patients. Our people joined with the teams from Sharp to maintain patient care, open day care centers for Sharp and Sodexo employees, staff a full-service pharmacy at the Qualcomm Center, and to provide food and shelter to temporarily dislocated Sodexo employees. 15 employees from Long Beach drove down to assist. Sodexo engineers helped clear space for the evacuees in one hospital and filter the smoky air that was filling another. Mike Lemme, our GM at Sharp Cabrillo, said it well: “Each and every one of our Sodexo staff became Guardian Angels that day to all the evacuees that came through our doors.”
St. Paul's in San Diego took in and cared for 34 residents evacuated from a senior retirement community nearby.
At Pepperdine, some employees drove 50 miles around closed roads to make it to campus to serve 1,300 students who were evacuated to the café and to the gym. Conference manager Cynthia Burton related “On Wednesday, when we all returned to work, the students left us THANK YOU cards all over our doors and on the walls! What a beautiful surprise to see all the nice comments.”
Second, there was great coordination at the local level across all of our business lines to ensure adequate staffing of our units that remained open. A great job here by all involved.
Let me assure you that our field managers are doing the right things for our hourly employees, some of whom were evacuated or could not make it to work due to road closures. Some of our managers went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the timely distribution of paychecks to their employees.
Our alert systems and employee disaster help line (1.888.SODEXHO) and disaster tracking systems worked well.
When we talk about our strengths as a company, one certainly is our service spirit. We are a company of people who really do care and who show that through our actions.
Again, I want to thank all of our teams involved in supporting our responses and our North American team for your expressions of concern.
George
George Chavel
President and CEO
Sodexo, Inc.