Western Hose and Gasket reopens after catastrophic 2022 fire

SAN DIEGO—On Aug. 1, 2022, Elliot LeGros received a call in the middle of the night: The San Diego headquarters of his company, Western Hose and Gasket, was burning down. There was no chance of salvaging the building.

Two and a half years after the three-alarm fire ripped through the Commerce City mainstay, the California-based hose manufacturing firm celebrated its grand reopening Jan. 31.

While the cause of the fire has remained uncertain thanks to melted security camera servers, LeGros said that forensic detectives with the fire department have said it likely stemmed from a faulty power strip.

"When I was a few miles out, I saw massive smoke and I knew we were in serious trouble," LeGros recalled. "I pulled around the corner and the whole building was fully engulfed in flames. It was a total loss; it had burned for an hour before anybody even called the fire department."

"We had two vending machines plugged into the same power strip, which is not a very smart idea. The power strip probably was very old and started failing."

So with its headquarters suddenly up in smoke, LeGros and the Western Hose and Gasket team needed a course of action.

LeGros stressed that, while unlikely, his situation can happen to anyone. But when such a scenario does happen, the victims rarely, if ever, have a course of action ready to go.

"When you sign your fire insurance check, you go, 'I'm good. If I have a fire, I'm good. I've got insurance.' But you never think about the next day after the fire," LeGros said. "A plan never crossed my mind, because you just think it's an unrealistic thing."

The morning of the fire, LeGros and his crew met in his living room to discuss the immediate future of the company. To calm fears and help the team get back on its feet quickly, LeGros assured his staff of about 50 workers that none of them would be laid off, even temporarily. That sort of attitude, he said, made the process much smoother.

"We said that nobody's getting let go, because I didn't think about it from my employees' perspective until a few hours later," he said. "A lot of them thought they were going to be out of a job, which never crossed my mind because my goal was to keep everybody employed through the whole process."

"When we brought everybody together that next morning, we said, 'We're not going anywhere.' "

Keeping an entire team on after losing the headquarters location is a noble pursuit, but logistical issues can always rear their ugly heads. Fortunately for Western Hose and Gasket, the company still had a secondary location in Los Angeles, which LeGros said became its primary production hub in the aftermath of the fire.

"We literally got computers ordered that day," LeGros said. "We transferred and bought a new server, and drove it up to our L.A. location… We had 25 people sitting in the living room. For about a month and a half, we operated like that."

"They handled it with such grace, and they were working 12-hour days up there. They upped their hours to be able to handle our influx of orders."

Still, making the multiple-hour drive from Los Angeles to San Diego, multiple times a day, can massively cut into production for a smaller firm like Western Hose and Gasket.

The team needed a way to get production back up and running in San Diego. LeGros said that the industry was more than willing to lend a hand.

LeGros described himself and his company as "big industry folk" in the hose world. As a major proponent of Industrial Distributor Co-Op (IDCO), NAHAD and the hose industry at large, the company has worked hard to become a known commodity in the hose industry. Still, LeGros could never have imagined the support he received after news broke about the fire.

"My phone rang with my most stringent competitors locally, as well as people in our space that do what we do across the country," he said. "Dozens and dozens of hose companies called me to reach out to offer help… It makes me a little teary-eyed even thinking about it. It was truly special."

One of the most important pieces of the reopening puzzle for the company was finding a way to reclaim a home base in San Diego. LeGros thanked a family friend for pointing him in the direction of a building that was just a mile away from the company's former base of operations.

"Finding a building in this area is nearly impossible," LeGros said of San Diego. "We kind of got out-bid by so many people while we were going around, looking for properties, plus they wanted five to seven year leases.

"When I was able to find this property that was owned by a family friend, somebody I went to school with, that gave us real peace. And it was so close."

The new San Diego building served as a temporary base while the team worked to build a new, full-time home. LeGros added that the team also acquired a third San Diego site about a year ago, located in Escandido.

"Really our game plan (now) is to get this place up and running like it was prior," he said of the new headquarters. "We're in a growth pattern, so we're looking for acquisitions. We're looking to continue to grow this business. I'm pretty young for this space, so we've got a lot of energy behind us right now."

LeGros gave an address at the annual NAHAD conference shortly after the fire happened, he said. He stressed to the hose industry attendees to think of a "Now what?" plan of action for the day after a disaster like the one he experienced. No matter how far-fetched the situation might seem, it can happen to anyone, he said.

"Really, no one has a plan for what you do the day after a fire," he said. "I didn't have a plan. You have to have a plan. Okay, catastrophe happens. Now what? You have to come up with your 'now what.'"

As life changing as the fire may have been for LeGros and Western Hose and Gasket, he said that he chooses to look back on the experience positively. In addition to being able to spread his story to raise awareness, he added that he doesn't mind how eventful things were for those two years.

"When I get older, these years will be some of the most memorable years that I could ever think of in my working career," LeGros said. "If everything had just been status quo for two years, it just would've been another two years under the belt and you keep chugging along.

"But I look at it as a blessing. It's a story to tell; it was exciting, it was terrifying. It's what makes life interesting."