A Christmas Eve fire destroyed Arway Linen’s plant and half of its inventory. Yet the family-owned company was back in business by Dec. 26. The family-owned company launders and delivers clean tablecloths, napkins, uniforms, aprons, and other linens to about 1,000 restaurant clients across the region.
Arway Linen has been busy this week, as usual, processing 200,000 pounds of laundry and delivering clean tablecloths, napkins, uniforms, and aprons to its 1,000 restaurant clients across the Philadelphia area. No one was injured in the blaze — thankfully the last employees had left hours earlier, company executives said — but it destroyed about half of Arway’s one-million-piece inventory. It also leftBut somehow Arway didn’t miss a day of service. With the help of other local linen companies, the company was back up and running by Dec. 26, delivering orders to its restaurant, country club, and senior-living clients. “Our customers rely on us,” said Steve Curtis, Arway’s director of sales and marketing. “They have reservations, banquets, weddings, holidays.”Around 9:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Mark Harad-Oaks, Arway’s director of operations, was at a family gathering when managing partner Mario Stagliano called: The alarms were going off at the plant, and their maintenance guy said they might want to get there as soon as possible.He told his family, including his father-in-law, Keith Harad, an Arway founder, “I gotta go, Arway is on fire,’” Harad-Oaks said. But “I didn’t know how on fire it was.” When Harad-Oaks and other executives arrived, they were met with a horrifying sight. The plant was engulfed. The three-alarm fire would take 17 hours to extinguish. The cause is under investigation. “It was gut wrenching to stand there next to drivers and people from the laundry side who live in the neighborhood … and just stare at this building that has been home,” Harad-Oaks said. “Many of us spent more hours a week there than with our own familie