The day before the fire was already heavy.
Our long-time General Manager, Dan Leberman, was finishing his final week with us. After years of leadership, knowledge, and steady presence, he had decided to make a career change. Friday was to be his last day. I was already feeling the weight of that transition.
My wife Kathryn and I had returned from being out of the country the weekend prior, and I had come home with more than memories — a bacterial infection from seafood soup that left me running a fever and feeling weak. By Thursday afternoon, I left the plant early, sick and uneasy. I remember carrying a sense of dread — about losing Dan’s institutional knowledge, about the workload ahead, about leadership in general.
That dread would take on a very different meaning a few hours later.
I went to bed early with a fever. At 3:40 a.m., my phone rang.
“No ID.”
I let it ring.
It rang again immediately.
I answered.
The caller was the sheriff. He asked if I was the owner of Vico Plastics and Vico Marine. I said yes. He paused only briefly before saying the building was on fire.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Really bad,” he replied.
In that instant, fear and dread flooded me in a way I can only compare to learning of the sudden death of a loved one. Your mind races ahead of reality. You think of people first. Then employees. Then customers. Then equipment. Then everything all at once.
I woke Kathryn and told her I was heading to the plant.
When I arrived, the entire building was an inferno.
I stopped near the truck stop about two blocks away. Even from there, the heat was intense. Flames were fully consuming the structure. Twelve ladder trucks from local fire departments had responded. I will forever be grateful for their effort, their speed, and their professionalism — even though at that point, the outcome was already clear.
Between the fever, the smoke in the air, and the shock of what I was watching, my body was failing me. I went into the 24-hour bathrooms at the truck stop and lay down on the tile floor to cool off. I remember the tile. Cold. Hard. Real. I later thanked the janitor. It sounds small, but in moments like that, small mercies matter. It could have been so much worse in so many ways.
Standing there watching the building burn, it felt like something had died.
That building held Bill Gridley’s legacy. It held decades of molds, presses, ideas, and hard work. It held the origin of the patented BV2 and everything that followed. It held the daily rhythm of a team that had built something meaningful together.
And on what was supposed to be our General Manager’s final day, it was gone.
That morning marked the beginning of one of the most daunting challenges of my life.
The days and months that followed tested every part of leadership — faith, endurance, decision-making, humility, gratitude. We were carried by extraordinary support: our employees, our customers, our partners, our insurance adjuster, and countless others who stepped forward when it mattered most.
Two years later, I can say this:
The fire destroyed a building.
It did not destroy the company.
It did not destroy the people.
And it did not destroy the legacy.
If anything, it clarified it.
We rebuilt — not just walls and equipment, but resolve. New presses. New molds. A new facility not far from where the old one stood. And perhaps most importantly, a deeper understanding of what Vico Marine truly is.
Vico Marine is not a structure of steel and concrete.
It is people. It is persistence. It is stewardship of something that began long before me and, God willing, will continue long after.
That night at 3:40 a.m., it felt like everything was ending.
In truth, it was the beginning of the next chapter.