Disaster zone

Recently Shanghai had its heaviest snowfall in 50 years. The kids loved it and we made snowmen, an igloo and snow angels. The most dramatic thing for me personally occurred when the roof of a very large warehouse my company operates collapsed under the weight of the snow. The warehouse was full of flat screen TVs, computers, cell phones, refrigerators, stoves and microwaves. It was right before Chinese New Year, the busy season for our customer, which exacerbated the disaster. I ended up spending about a week of very long days and late nights out at the warehouse organizing a recovery effort which involved hiring demolition and recovery crews, renting giant cranes to pull the scraps of roof off and finding trucks and new warehouse space to move the salvageable stuff into. It was high drama with millions of dollars of damage and plenty of screaming Chinese people. In law school or forestry school I never imagined I’d find myself in an industrial zone outside of Shanghai in the middle of a snowstorm wearing a hard hat while climbing around on rubble and remnants of plasma TVs.