Chris Mlynarczyk’s friends were beginning to joke that he had an uncanny knack for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Mlynarczyk, a regional purchasing manager for McDonald’s Corp., lived through a major earthquake in Guam. He was in Hawaii when a hurricane flattened parts of the islands.
And in Los Angeles, where he lives, he has faced floods, fires, even riots.
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So when a previously unknown fault shook the earth beneath Southern California at 4:31 a.m. Jan. 17, Mlynarczyk’s first thought, as he hopped out of bed and rushed under his bedroom doorway, was, “Here I go again.”
That thought reverberated throughout McDonald’s that Monday.
Since 1972, when Hurricane Agnes pummeled the northeastern U.S., the world’s largest restaurant chain has become a hardened veteran of disasters.
In the last two years alone, it has endured Hurricane Andrew, Los Angeles riots and Mississippi River flooding. Overseas, it has confronted social and economic chaos in Russia, Poland, the former East Germany and China.
Yet McDonald’s shut down restaurants only in war-torn former Yugoslovia, where a trade embargo forced the action.
“Resilient” is the way one company official described the company.
With more than 4,200 restaurants overseas, its exposure to wars, revolutions and economic crises, as well as natural disasters, has made McDonald’s a role model for other decentralized, worldwide companies.
On the day of the earthquake, Mlynarczyk was planning a flight to Hawaii, where McDonald’s has 500 stores. But heading to the airport, he realized from radio reports that the quake’s damage was far more extensive than he imagined.
“My immediate reaction was to drive into the valley,” said the 37-year-old native Midwesterner. “The damage was incredible.”
Unable to reach anyone on his cellular phone, Mlynarczyk began preparing what had by now become a familiar emergency drill.
“I’d gone through this so many different times,” he said, “my friends were telling me I should write a book on contingency plans.”
His immediate concern was the status of McDonald’s suppliers-principally the Golden State Foods warehouse in the City of Industry some 40 miles east of the epicenter. Then there were the trucking routes. If freeways were cut off, as radio reports indicated, new routes must be found for deliveries.
Mlynarczyk drove to McDonald’s regional offices in Woodland Hills, 5 miles from the quake’s epicenter. He wasn’t allowed inside the 12-story glass-and-steel building, where cabinets and computers had been thrown to the floor.
“I never felt stranded until this time,” he said. “All I wanted was a telephone and a few files and a desk where I could work.”
Using a pay phone, Mlynarczyk eventually reached McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook. Then he called his family in St. Louis and St. Petersburg, Fla., to let them know he was OK.
As Mlynarczyk knew from previous disasters, water was a priority. During the hurricane in Hawaii, the company’s pasteurization plant in Honolulu had been used to produce drinkable water.
By Monday afternoon, a Pasadena dairy that deals exclusively with McDonald’s was filling 5-gallon containers with pasteurized water. These were immediately sent to 30 or so affected restaurants and to 10 Red Cross centers across the city.
“Distribution to the majority of locations had not been affected,” Mlynarczyk said. “We also made arrangements with our mobile units and developed the logistics of stationing them at the Red Cross Command Post to hand out food.”
By the end of that first day, all but 9 of the 200 McDonald’s within 50 miles of the epicenter were operating.
Some 2,000 miles away, the Chicago area was fighting its own battle with Mother Nature. The mercury had plummeted to 13 below zero that day.
But that hardly mattered to dozens of McDonald’s managers, even as they navigated their cars in frigid temperatures toward the company’s Oak Brook headquarters.
Despite its outward appearance-the 80-acre campus, with its tree-lined trails and lake, seems nearly impervious to outside crises-the place was feeling its own tremors from the quake.
Michael R. Quinlan, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer; Jack M. Greenberg, vice chairman and chief financial officer; Edward H. Rensi, president and chief executive of U.S. operations; and dozens of others were desperate for information.
Yet phone lines had been knocked out throughout Los Angeles. So, like millions of others across the U.S., top executives at McDonald’s and those in the communications department gathered around TVs and watched the news.
“At that point, it really wasn’t clear how devastating it was,” said Bruce Salazar, director of operations for the zone covering most of California and Arizona.
Gradually, Salazar, Chuck Ebeling, director of corporate communications, Bridget Marshall, director of community relations, and several others set up base in a large glass-walled conference room on the second floor.
Around 9 a.m., they contacted the American Red Cross in Los Angeles. For years, McDonald’s and the relief agency had worked together during disasters (as it has done previously, the company contributed large quantities of food from vans after the quake) and, now, the company turned to the Red Cross to find out what was going on.
But even the Red Cross could not be reached. All the executives heard was an apologetic tape-recording asking callers to leave a message.
“That was clearly a yellow light, maybe not a red light,” Marshall said. “But clearly a yellow light” that things were going to be very bad indeed.
Before a Red Cross official called several hours later, board members had already approved an emergency $100,000 grant to the agency for quake victims.
Meanwhile, the Oak Brook staff, the command post in the City of Industry, where phone communication to the Midwest was possible, and field-service personnel, who were reporting directly from damaged sites, tried to coordinate the recovery effort.
Because conference calls involved several dozen people trying to ask questions or relay information at the same time, “communication was happening at all different levels all at once,” Ebeling said. “That required a tremendous amount of patience.”
But at least the Oak Brook staff could get some reassurance from knowing the McDonald’s system was designed so that if one area is knocked out by a disaster, other McDonald’s regions can quickly help out.
“McDonald’s is somewhat like the military,” Ebeling said. “We have tremendous redundancies in our services.”
For instance, if Golden State Foods had been shut down by the quake, the San Francisco and other nearby distribution centers would have picked up the slack.
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All of McDonald’s distribution is done by truck and each restaurant’s order is customized and packed together in one truck. Once or twice a week, a McDonald’s will receive all the hamburger, fries, shakes, napkins and other orders in one delivery.
After the quake, those deliveries were relayed to Golden State Foods by field personnel who visited each restaurant.
One of the dispatches from L.A. to Oak Brook concerned Hank Tunney, the owner of the McDonald’s restaurant in the heart of Northridge, a community right above the quake’s epicenter.
Ever since Tunney flipped hamburgers at McDonald’s as a high school student, his dream was to own a franchise. It came true on Oct. 1, 1992, when he bought the Northridge restaurant.
Now, as Monday dawned in the San Fernando Valley and distant fires blended into the rays of the rising sun, Tunney sat on the curb outside his battered home and wondered if his dream had crumbled.
“I waited outside for the sun to rise,” said Tunney, who lives with his family a few miles from the restaurant. “A friend said, `I think the epicenter is at your store.’ We thought he was kidding.”
It turned out the friend was right. When Tunney arrived, the parking lot of the outdoor mall was jammed with fire trucks and ambulances stationed at the site after the local firehouse was evacuated.
The familiar sight of the Golden State Foods delivery trucks and a few of his employees comforted Tunney. “Although it’s a big tragedy, some things remain constant,” he thought.
Tunney entered the restaurant against his son’s wishes and smelled gas. He immediately turned off the gas main and opened the doors.
“The kitchen was a nightmare,” he said. “Everything had moved. Grills jumped from one side of the kitchen to another. The friers were empty and there was oil all over the floor.”
It took until noon Tuesday to clean up the mess. “It was a disaster,” recalled restaurant manager Brenda Morris, who had to take back streets from her canyon home because the freeway she normally took had collapsed.
“You opened the refrigerator door and things fell on you,” she said. “Eggs were broken, there was shake mix all over the floor, lettuce. Five-hundred pound tanks had moved and cracked the walls.”
By 1 p.m. Tuesday, the restaurant had opened its doors. Half of Tunney’s 48 employees were displaced by the quake. For the first few days, Tunney relied on reinforcements from other restaurants and from the regional office, which remained closed for a week.
He did, however, get help from an unexpected source. Jennifer Dunn , manager of internal communications in Oak Brook, happened to be in Dana Point, 40 miles south of Los Angeles, with her husband on a business trip at the time of the quake.
As soon as she called Oak Brook, she was immediately drafted to be headquarters’ “eyes and ears,” reporting on the quake for Oak Brook.
The first two days, she navigated her way to the epicenter, traveling along U.S. Interstate 5 and U.S. Hwy. 101, visiting Red Cross posts and shelters and making sure the McDonald’s relief efforts were running smoothly.
After a long day Wednesday, Dunn decided to visit the first McDonald’s she came upon in Northridge. It happened to be Tunney’s restaurant.
“The staff was exhausted,” Dunn said. “After I interviewed some of the employees and customers, the dinner rush started. It was packed.”
Dunn looked over at the store manager and noticed that she was furiously putting together Happy Meal containers. Dunn asked to help.
“After doing that for a while,” Dunn said, “I went back into the kitchen and noticed the maintenance manager was really busy doing dishes, so I helped with that for 45 minutes.”
Of the three McDonald’s in Northridge, Tunney’s was the only one in operation. It was also one of the only restaurants or grocery stores open in the entire area.
“Swamped isn’t the word,” said Tunney. “I couldn’t see the ends of the lines. They wound through the restaurant, back to the restrooms.”
On Wednesday, as customers swamped Tunney’s restaurant, office manager Pamela Hagar stood at the regional headquarters a few miles away and surveyed the damage.
For the first two days, her townhouse in Santa Monica had become a mini-command post, serving as a contact point between Oak Brook and the San Fernando Valley.
Now, as she waited in her hard hat for the locksmith to open the skewed lobby doors, Hagar prepared for the worst. She was sent to rent equipment and furniture and relocate to a rented space.
“It looked like something out of a war scene,” recalled Hagar. “Filing cabinets had fallen. There were a lot of fallen ceiling tiles. There were cracks and holes behind the Xerox machines. The refrigerator had opened and fallen in the lunch room.”
But to Hagar’s relief, the damage could be easily repaired. “It was so much better than I had imagined,” she said.
On Thursday Hagar re-entered the office with a co-worker to turn off the power switches on all the computers, when a series of major aftershocks rocked the building.
“We headed for the stairwell and didn’t come back till the next day,” Hagar recalled.
On Friday, the voice mail, phone service and power were all restored, as the employees started “picking up the broken pieces.”‘