The Denver Post Al Lewis column.

Publication: Denver Post (Denver, CO)

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COPYRIGHT 2005 The Denver Post

Byline: Al Lewis

Sep. 9--Oreck Corp., maker of a widely advertised 8-pound vacuum cleaner, has spent the past two weeks gathering its 1,200 employees from the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina.

With a corporate headquarters in New Orleans and a manufacturing plant about 100 miles away, near Gulfport, Miss., the family-owned business took a double blow from Katrina.

"We always had contingency plans for a possible disaster in either New Orleans or on the Gulf Coast, but we never really planned on a storm so large that it would have an impact on both places," chief executive Tom Oreck told me in a telephone interview this week.

Oreck's father, 82, founded the company in 1963. He's the smiling, bald...

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