For Merrimack Valley Restaurants, Recovery From Gas Explosions A Slow Process
LAWRENCE (CBS) – Retired Lawrence police officer Tom Murphy sat at his usual table, sipping on his daily tea. He sat with his back to the Carleen's Diner counter, his eyes facing out the windows.
"We come here every morning to discuss the world," he said. "All that time without Carleen's we had to go other places and it just wasn't the same, you know?" He pointed his finger down at the table. "This is our table."
Murphy didn't go to Carleen's from September 13, 2018 until January 15, 2019. The 35-year-old, cash-only, no-nonsense diner was shut down longer than most other restaurants, after gas explosions nearby rocked the community and killed a Lawrence teenager.
"We've lost so much," owner John Farrington said. "I can't even tell you."
When the gas explosions first hit right near Carleen's, Farrington put $10,000 of food on ice, brewed fresh pots of coffee, and handed muffins and juice to any first responders and workers who needed it. He thought he would be closed for three days, max.
But as Lawrence became a ghost town – residents gone, replaced by police officers and gas workers in neon vests – Farrington realized recovery would take much longer.
Week after week, the Lawrence staple prepared to reopen.
"We came here at Christmastime, decorated for Christmas, and then came back and took it down," waitress Jennifer Marsan recalled.
She and others received checks from Columbia Gas for their time out of work – albeit, with less tips – until around Christmastime. That's when the checks stopped coming, leaving the wait staff to fend for themselves for three more weeks.
"I took a Christmas loan out to pay my house mortgage," Farrington shared.
"I'm a single mom," added Marsan. "I needed the money. I needed to pay rent."
Restaurant owners all over the Merrimack Valley were in the same boat, wondering when they would reopen and not knowing what to tell staff in the meantime.
"It was nonstop for seven weeks," said Franco Lozano, the co-owner of Bueno Malo in Andover. "Every single day there was something else we walked into. That was the toughest part, that first three weeks. The first three weeks of not knowing if our staff is going to have a job; not knowing if I was going to have money to pay my staff. It was tough."
Bueno Malo is a small Mexican restaurant in downtown Andover. It had only been open for nine months before the gas explosions shut it down. The afternoon of the explosions, Lozano looked under the deep fryer, only to have flames burst up to the ceiling.
"Physically I might have been okay," he said. "I'm not going to sugarcoat it. There are some lingering effects. I can never look at a pilot light the same way again, that's for sure."
Since its reopening seven weeks after the explosions, Bueno Malo has seen its customers come back "in full force," according to Lozano. He is in meetings with other restaurant owners to plan a restaurant week to encourage customers to come back and eat local. He has also participated in the "Rock the Register" effort, which awards electronic gift cards to local residents.
Efforts like that, though, Carleen's owner John Farrington feels leave his restaurant behind. The cash-only diner does not benefit from gift cards or social media campaigns. Its customer base was built by word of mouth and community ties over the course of 35 years. That is why people like Tom Murphy came back.
"Our allegiance was coming back here," Murphy said. "They've always been so good to us. It's a place where the old-timers can talk every day."
Other customer, however, have not come back to Carleen's. Farrington says he has seen a steep decline in his returning customers.
"We used to have a lot of contractors come in the morning, 5 o'clock in the morning, 6 to 7 tables of guys, all talking to each other, talking over the tables," he said. "We lost all that. They moved on. They go somewhere else now. That whole two hours of business every morning is gone."
Farrington has received payments from Columbia Gas, but says it's not enough, and no number of payments can bring his customer base back. He has not raised prices and has refused to fire staff. Every single staff member came back to work after the explosions because he is praying that business gets back to how it used to be. Still, he has thought about the worst.
"We don't want to have to go out of business," he said. "We just want to get back to a comfortable place where we can stop struggling to swim."