Harrisburg Escapes the Flood Plane
by Clark Robinson
In 1972, the remnants of Hurricane Agnes pounded Harrisburg, Pa., for four days, flooding the Susquehanna River. Paxton Creek, which flows under Market Street about a block away from Harrisburg's main newspaper, The Patriot-News, backed up and also flooded.
As the water approached the newspaper's front door, most employees fled for higher ground. One senior telephone operator refused to leave, however, choosing instead to handle incoming emergency calls. She stayed at her post until water filled the main floor. Rescuers finally escorted her out of the building in a rowboat and headed east down Market Street.
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Hurricane Agnes flooded The Patriot-News in 1972. Some workers were forced to leave by rowboat, others by helicopter. |
About a half a block away, the rescuers tried to cross 10th Street, by then a raging river. The operator panicked, lost her balance and fell overboard. Her body was found three days later, caught amongst the flood debris about three blocks downstream.
Although the telephone operator was the newspaper's only casualty that day, many other employees suffered tremendous hardship, and the newspaper's management did what it could to help them. Current Pressroom Superintendent Terry Gross, who was an engraver at the time, was in the process of moving his family into a new home when the storm hit. Both his old and his new houses were flooded. The Patriot-News sent Gross home for three weeks with full pay. In fact, although many employees lost work days in the aftermath of the flood, not one was denied a regular paycheck.
The Unsinkable Letterpress
Three years before the Agnes flood, The Patriot-News purchased a brand-new, 10-unit Hoe Colormatic letterpress.
A long, thin strip of red tape on a support column in the pressroom still marks the high-water mark of the flood. It is about 11 feet above the floor. An offset press, with its intricate and sensitive technology, probably would not have survived. Two weeks after the flood, however, the simple Hoe letterpress was back in operation, churning out copies of The Patriot-News.
Refurbishing the letterpress did not come easily--it had to be completely disassembled to remove mud and water from its internal working parts.
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A 10-unit Hoe Colormatic letterpress survived the flood and continues to produce award-winning quality. |
"We brought in WD-40 in 55-gallon drums," says Gross, "and we spent hours and hours squirting oil everywhere."
The repair bill for the three-year-old press totaled more than its purchase price. Engineers said the press had been seriously damaged and should be replaced within five years. Twenty-six years later, it's still running, and "we're still getting mud and water out of it," says Gross. Amazingly, it still prints at a high level of quality. Last March, The Patriot-News won first place in the letterpress division of the Print Quality Contest at America-East in Hershey, Pa.
The 1972 flood was supposed to be a once-in-a-century event, but Harrisburg flooded again in January 1996. And while the water didn't reach the newspaper's main building this time, it did flood the street separating it from a warehouse storing inserts.
"That's when they made the decision to build on higher ground," says Production Manager Fred A. Stickel, Jr.
A New Beginning
That higher ground is a 17.2-acre site in Hampden Township, about five miles south of the current building. The Patriot-News recently contracted with The Austin Co. of Cleveland to break ground there on a 168,000-square-foot plant, expected to open in 2000, that will house printing and mailroom operations. Editorial, advertising, circulation and administrative functions will remain downtown.
The construction represents something of a new beginning for the 130-year-old Patriot-News, a chance to exorcise the demons of its flood-plagued past. "We're very excited about the new plant," says Christopher W. Spivey, manager of information services.
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Harrisburg broke ground in April on a new printing facility located outside the flood plane. |
The new facility will offer not only relief from flooding, but also many opportunities to upgrade technology. A quick tour around the current plant illustrates this point.
An obvious place to start is at the heroic Hoe letterpress. It will be replaced in the new plant by seven four-high tower Colorliner printing units with a double folder from Goss Graphic Systems Inc., Westmont, Ill. Space is being provided for an eighth tower and another folder, and the site will allow for future expansion to accommodate a second press if necessary.
The lower level will comprise a warehouse capable of storing a 30-day supply of newsprint, a 96-roll laydown area and nine reelstands with space provided for a tenth.
According to Gross, the current 54-inch web will probably be trimmed to 50 inches on the new press. The Patriot-News conducted focus groups in which readers found the slimmer newspaper easier to handle, the same conclusion reached in similar testing conducted by The Toronto Star in 1986 (TechNews, November/December 1995, p. 10).
The Patriot-News is using the new Performance Plus high-strength printing inks from Flint Ink Corp. of Detroit and will likely continue to do so in the new plant. "The mileage is much better than standard inks," says Gross. "Also, the yellow stands out so much better. It is a true color with no red cast."
Process systems will include a recirculating ink system for black and color, an ink-management system, a reclamation system for waste ink, and an indirect process-waste system that will feed to an exterior storage tank. "We will also be able to implement closed-loop registration, and closed-loop color using densitometers on the press," says Spivey.
Pre-Press Preview
Harrisburg is approaching full pagination on its editorial/pagination system from Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla. All editorial except for the Weddings and Family sections and some graphics has migrated, but display ads have not.
The paper plans to be fully paginated before 2000, so all pages can be transmitted from the downtown offices to the new plant via leased, redundant fiber-optic links. These links will also carry other voice and data traffic between the two sites. They may even be used to help synchronize databases at one site with mirror databases at the other, a level of redundancy understandably attractive to The Patriot-News, given its history.
Once the paper is fully paginated, computer to plate may not be far behind. "We'll be visiting the CTP booths at NEXPO," says Spivey.
Other changes in pre-press operations that will be made possible by full pagination and the new press include ink presets and press-gain compensation at the raster-image processors (currently Alpha servers from Digital Equipment Corp. of Merrimack, N.H., running Graphics software from Autologic Information International Inc. of Thousand Oaks, Calif.).
Post-Press Predictions
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This Ferag Inc. Rotodisk winder will be replaced in the new plant by a Ferag Variodisk winder. |
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This GMA Inc. SLS2000 inserter will make the trip to the new printing facility. |
The new plant site is near the geographic midpoint of eight Patriot-News distribution centers. The newspaper delivers to 64 ZIP-code zones, but "that's today. Tomorrow we could be at route level," says Circulation Director Betty Way.
The downtown plant uses a Rotodisk winder from Ferag Inc. of Bristol, Pa., as a buffer between the press and two inserting machines-an SLS2000 28:2 inserter from GMA Inc. of Bethlehem, Pa., and a 10:1 inserter from Ferag. In the new plant, the Rotodisk will be replaced by a Ferag Variodisk winder. The SLS2000 will make the move, but the Ferag inserter will be replaced by a second SLS2000 whose size has not yet been determined.
Harrisburg's mailroom currently receives insert information from the advertising department in a semi-automated manner. Advertising enters data into the circulation system (software from Collier-Jackson of Tampa, Fla., on a DEC Alpha); this data is converted into Microsoft Excel and shipped to the mailroom. The goal, says Spivey, is to directly interface the circulation system with the inserters.
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In the new plant, these carts from Cannon Equipment Co. will be loaded automatically. |
Bundles are loaded manually into carts from Cannon Equipment Co. Inc. of Rosemount, Minn., prior to being trucked to the DCs. Each cart holds 72,000 newspaper (newsprint) pages. As inserts arrive, their thickness is gauged with a micrometer and converted to equivalent newsprint pages; these numbers and the number of pages in the day's paper are entered into a computer to calculate the number of bundles per cart, says Spivey. The new plant will use automated cart loaders, also from Cannon.
The People Factor
The production staff, which was union at one point, has de-certified. This reflects its trust in a management team that seems to go out of its way to take care of its workers.
"You really have to try hard to get fired here," says Stickel. "We have about 500 full-time employees, and that number hasn't changed in 32 years. It's just that as the technology changes, people get moved into different areas."
A case in point is the newspaper's handling of pagination. The composing-room staff has shrunk from 120 to 10, all through attrition. No one was laid off.
People stay with the company a long time. Stickel has been with Newhouse Newspapers for 34 years, Gross for 32. And it's a family affair-Stickel's son works in the mailroom; Gross' son and daughter both work in the mailroom, and his wife works in accounting.
Harrisburg faces major challenges in the years ahead--constructing the new press facility, making it operational, working out the bugs and transitioning its press operators from letterpress to offset. One gets the impression, though, that The Patriot-News will handle the transitions with the same resilience and innovation it used to survive two floods and still produce an award-winning newspaper.
Clark Robinson is the editor of TechNews. E-mail, robic@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1686; fax, (703) 902-1690. Photographs courtesy of The Patriot-News.