Firefighters working to extinguish the fire that ripped through the truck, resulting in over 188,000 pieces of destroyed mail.

There’s nothing worse (or more stressful) than receiving news that a truck carrying over 10,000 of your client’s mail pieces has been destroyed in a fire. Sounds like a scene straight out of a James Bond movie, right?

Unfortunately, it happened! A truck carrying more than 188,000 pieces of mail (among them were our client’s pieces) caught fire and all the mail was destroyed. As you can tell from the photos, that’s a pretty massive amount of mail to go up in smoke. Adding to the complexity of the situation, our client’s mail piece was the first in a sequenced mailing.

So, what do you tell your client who had over 10,000 pieces of mail completely destroyed in a fiery inferno?

That’s simple: the truth.

The aftermath of the fire once it was contained by the firefighters.

After informing our client about the fire and consulting with them, PMG swiftly resolved the situation by immediately reprinting the destroyed mail packages.  Thanks to our proprietary mail-tracking system, we were able to precisely identify exactly which donors’ mail was on that particular truck. In addition, we shifted the timing of the follow-up mailing, which was already in production. Both campaigns were back on schedule within one day of the fire and at no cost to the client.

While having a mailing destroyed by fire was a first for us, we were able to quickly solve the problem.

A big thanks to all our employees who worked overtime to ‘put out the flames’!