The Sellita watch company saw its outer casing destroyed after the storm that hit La Chaux-de-Fonds (NE). Specializing in the assembly, design and manufacture of quality mechanical movements, it hopes for a partial restart in the near future.
“We will have to secure the building and ensure that we can resume activity as soon as possible when our employees return from vacation, because they are still in concern”, explained Tuesday to Keystone-ATS Miguel Garcia, boss of Sellita, at Crêt-du-Locle. “Three weeks seems short,” he tempers.
Miguel Garcia speaks of the desolation of seeing partially or totally destroyed buildings in the surroundings. Beyond that, he concedes that he doesn’t understand how it happened, referring to their supposed solidity. ‘The building resisted, but not the facades or the windows’, notes the industrialist whose company is a major employer.
Clear the debris
In his eyes, the most urgent thing is to get rid of the debris. ‘We must get down to work to speed up the work’. All this for ‘five minutes’ of deluge, with winds over 200 km/h. Referring to the amount of damage, he mentions, without being able to give figures, that it is a question of redoing the entire outer envelope.
“But the main thing for me is to start over,” concludes Miguel Garcia, who bought Sellita Watches in 2003. In fact, the building of the caliber manufacturer in Chaux-de-Fonds suffered above all from having received materials arriving at high speed from the neighboring warehouse, which was also very deteriorated.
/ATS
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