We follow up on the Umart situation in Brisbane as floodwaters recede, leaving behind a very expensive mess.
As we covered last Thursday, Umart Milton had been almost completely submerged underneath an overwhelming volume of water, and as we predicted, damage to the stock within the store was indeed significant. Tony Lau was quick to reassure customers in the whirlpool thread on January 14, resolutely digging the Umart team's heels into the ground:
"Sadly, we have lost a lot, but Umart won't be beaten, the water levels have declined and we will be resuming business within a few days; for those customer who have paid for their orders, we will fulfil your order; for customers who are waiting to purchase from Umart Online, thank you very much, we will be up and running within a few days."
One of Atomic's forum users, Jedi_Vader20, captured some images of the outside of the store on the night of January 16, giving a small glimpse at the damage – with a pile of wrecked, dirty office equipment piled outside the front door. It wasn't until now that we have received images of the destruction during daylight hours, as taken by Umart Milton employee Craig O'Loughlin directly from his mobile phone. Craig detailed the extent of the destruction, and it's not a pretty picture:
"The water line went right to the roof... There is destroyed stock everywhere. In the blurry shot of the warehouse you can make out a HD6950 at the bottom near the front sitting under 500kg+ shelves that were toppled like dominos. Pallets of CPU's including heaps of brand spanking new Gen 2 i7'sand i5's as well as pallets of laptops and monitors were all being sorted through but the great majority were picked up by a dozer and taken away. There is hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock lying in a few feet of mud. Not good stuff but I hope we can be somehow up and running again soon."
Among the stock casualties are brand-new technologies like the HD6950 that we just reviewed, and emerging tech like LED-backlit LCD monitors. An exact monetary figure can't be determined, something likely to never be publicly known, but it's a huge blow to the Brisbane-based retailer. It remains to be seen how quickly Umart will recover.
NOTE: We have removed the gallery at the request of Umart management.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012