Christmas In August Post Office Load Running Higher Than Holiday Season Thanks To Ups Strike

It’s like Christmas, only bigger.

Across town from the UPS strike talks, Postal Service managers gather before a bank of computer terminals, shifting airplanes and trucks nationwide to cope with a tide of new business.

This is the post office command center, a dimly lit war room on the seventh floor of postal headquarters. It usually gears up only during the holiday crunch.

It’s been used since the strike against UPS began, and indications Friday were that it may be needed indefinitely. Despite encouraging signs earlier in the week, Teamsters President Ron Carey said Friday the two sides were no closer than when they began talking Thursday.

Both sides indicated outside the talks that they were prepared to be more flexible, but those intentions apparently fizzled.

Expecting a tidal wave of new business, the post office put its command center into 24-hour operation the day the Teamsters struck UPS. The expectations were right.

Postal Vice President Nicholas Barranca estimated that the post office is handling between 15 percent and 20 percent of United Parcel Service’s 12 million-piece daily business. That means between 1.8 million and 2.4 million extra items per day.

“We had a million pounds of mail in the system the night before last,” Barranca said of the network of leased planes handling Express and some Priority mail. That’s more than at Christmas time, postal officials report, though the volume of First Class and other mail is not as high as the holiday season.

The center works with 10 regional command canters, linked to a daily meeting here by teleconference.

In Washington, mail managers sit at a bank of 16 computer terminals. Four giant screens line the wall in front of them.

One screen is the Mail Condition Reporting System where they can see the volume of mail on hand at each sorting center, offering an early warning if things start to back up.

Another screen carries the news - useful for reports of any road, railway or airport problems. The managers also have access to the National Weather Service. Weather warnings can be especially important at Christmastime, but are also valuable if summer storms are likely to delay flights.

The Postal Service has a fleet of 29 leased aircraft, mostly Boeing 727s and DC-9s used primarily for Express Mail service. They carry mail from across the country to a hub at Indianapolis where it is sorted in a three-or-four hour frenzy and then sent out again.

If problems develop at the Indianapolis hub, mail can be trucked to Cincinnati or Chicago and flown from there.

That’s why the third giant screen in the operations center tracks the movement of the post offices’s fleet of planes and the fourth records mail movement on commercial carriers, showing where mail is waiting to go and where it is arriving.

First Class mail moves mostly on commercial planes. Indeed, Barranca says, “we’re their biggest cargo customer.” At least 15,000 airline flights each day carry the mail, and Barranca’s staff tracks them with updates every 15 minutes so receiving offices can be ready for sorting and delivery.

“If Delta has a problem in Atlanta we can shift to other carriers or move mail to another airport,” he explained. If storms block the airport in Buffalo, N.Y., a load of mail from Dallas might be switched to a different flight, headed for Boston perhaps, and then brought to Buffalo in trucks.

The UPS strike “has been a good experience for us,” Barranca said.

“It’s an opportunity for customers who didn’t do business with us, or only gave us a small part of their business, to experience the service we can offer.”

“I think some of it will stay,” he said of the new business shifted from former UPS customers. UPS speculates that the company has lost so much business permanently that it will have to cut 15,000 jobs. The walkout by 185,000 Teamsters entered its 12th day Friday.

The Postal Service’s center coordinates the flow of mail among 300 main processing plants, 21 bulk mail centers and the nation’s 40,000 post offices.

Express Mail, the post office’s guaranteed overnight service, is up 70 percent, while two- to three-day Priority Mail has had a 50 percent increase and parcel post is up 20 percent, said Barranca, postal vice president for operations support.

Coping with the sudden increase has taxed more than the transportation system, and Barranca said the post office has hired 4,100 temporary workers across the country.

The strike is costing UPS up to $300 million a week in business.