By Monroe Roark

After the repeated media reports since August of political and bureaucratic incompetence in responding to natural disasters, you might be wondering how efficiently the private sector could handle such a job.

Take a short drive to Hampton and you can see it. I imagine some of you saw it firsthand over the weekend.

The morning of July 13, I rode in a pickup truck around Atlanta Motor Speedway as an AMS employee pointed out the specifics of various reconstruction activities. This was less than one week after tornado-like winds swept through the complex and wreaked havoc never before seen there. It was an interesting sight.

For day-to-day operations, the entire staff was crowded in the security building on the main boulevard leading to the track. The gigantic tower that houses the condos, luxury suites and administrative offices was still without electrical power at that time. Trees were down everywhere, a couple of which blocked unauthorized vehicles from getting too close to the grandstands.

But there was a flurry of activity. Hundreds of workers were cleaning up trash in the parking lots and working on the damaged structures. There was a good reason for this: they had a serious deadline. The next major Nextel Cup race on the AMS schedule, the Bass Pro Shops MBNA 500, was looming on the calendar at the end of October.

Fast-forward three and a half months. The weekend of racing goes ahead as usual. For the fans in the rest of the country watching on television, there was little to indicate anything out of the ordinary had ever occurred.

“All of the grandstands were back up,” said W.L. Morrison, a Henry County resident who has attended every NASCAR race in Hampton for more than 15 years. “I’d say there were about 120,000 there. It looked like a normal Sunday to me.”

The race was not sold out, but it seldom is these days since it is no longer the final event on the Cup schedule. But 120,000 people is still nearly double the capacity for an Atlanta Falcons home game.

The only noticeable difference, according to Morrison, was the absence of the old press box, built in the 1960s atop the back grandstand. It was a casualty of the storm, and it might never be rebuilt, not really a problem, since the media center has been in the infield for years.

To further illustrate what happened since July, speedway officials devoted a portion of their pre-race activities Sunday to honoring the reconstruction teams for their work.
According to AMS reports, that work included more than eight miles of fencing, 129 new flag poles, 639 plumbing fixtures, 750 tons of air conditioning systems, 10,000 tons of asphalt, over 12,000 square yards of carpet, 20,250 cubic feet of concrete and 272,000 square feet of drywall.

A total of 97 contractors and subcontractors worked around the clock, devoting about 350,000 man hours to the massive project.

Now before you fire up your e-mail software to try and point out the obvious to me, I am well aware that a tornado hitting a racetrack does not compare to the devastation of an entire city and its residents.

But for AMS and its parent company, Speedway Motorsports, the urgency cannot be overstated because, like hundreds of thousands of businesses in the United States, large and small, the livelihoods of a lot of people were depending on race weekend going off as scheduled.

Some estimates have pegged the AMS reconstruction costs (so far) at around $40 million. I would assume that a great deal of that money came from insurance, and the company may very well have been forced to dig into its own cash reserves.

The principal owner of AMS, Bruton Smith, is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion, so maybe money was not a problem.

It doesn’t really matter, because neither Smith nor the people in charge of racing in Hampton had the luxury of sitting around, waiting for government handouts and bickering about the bid process.

There was a business to run, and millions of dollars in revenue at stake. Simply put, people figured out what they needed to do, and they did it.

It would take a team of economic experts to accurately state the impact of AMS on the local economy. The year-round staff of about 60 grows to some 5,000 total employees on race weekend, AMS president Ed Clark told me a couple of years ago.

All of those fans eat in restaurants, stay in motels and buy race-related merchandise all over the south metro Atlanta area while going to and from the track. Over the past 15 years, about $200 million has been spent on capital improvements at AMS.

And as for the the past three months, maybe somebody from FEMA should pay a visit to Hampton and take some notes. Or perhaps Clark, a Peachtree City resident, and his staff can take some time before the next race and oversee some hurricane cleanup.

Private enterprise 1, government zero. That’s one score you’re not likely to see on Sportscenter.

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