Snowboard firm to donate masks
The Burton snowboard company is donating 500,000 respirator masks to hospitals across the Northeast, harnessing the company's worldwide footprint to help put a dent in the country's lagging stockpile of personal protective equipment for the coronavirus pandemic.
Donna Burton Carpenter said her company's largest binding manufacturer, Fudakin in China, directed her to a nearby factory that was making FDA-approved KN95 respirator masks. The price of masks were increasing almost by the hour as competing bidders sought to increase their supplies.
She ended up paying about $1.25 per mask — more than double what they usually cost — then set about finding a way to ship them directly from China to Vermont, where Burton is headquartered.
The first 48,000 masks have been delivered and are earmarked for hospitals across Vermont and for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, where Burton Carpenter's late husband, Jake, spent two months in 2015 while fighting a rare nerve disorder. The rest of the masks are scheduled to arrive within the next two weeks and will be distributed along the East Coast; at least half will go to particularly hard-hit areas of New York and Boston.
The government's Health and Human Services Department recently surveyed 323 hospitals around the country and they reported widespread shortages of personal protective equipment and uncertainty about their availability from federal and state sources.
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott called the Burton donation "a prime example of how Vermonters are rising to the occasion and uniting around a common purpose during these unprecedented times."
Burton Carpenter said she's using her own funds for the masks. Like so many companies across so many industries, Burton is suffering. The company has been forced to lay off about 250 of its 1,000 or so employees...