Last week’s pounding rain brought on a little unwanted d & #233;j & #341; vu for Quest Diagnostics Inc.’s Nichols Institute in San Juan Capistrano.
“Yeah, I had a twinge,” said Jon Nakamoto, the medical testing laboratory’s managing director.
Workday life has been getting back to normal at Nichols after January’s heavy rains washed out Ortega (SR-74) Highway, the main route into the medical testing lab near the Cleveland National Forest.
The closure made getting testing samples to Nichols near impossible. At first, tests were diverted to Chantilly, Va., where Quest has another lab under the Nichols name.
Then helicopters were used to get tests in and out of the Ortega Highway campus.
The situation was just as taxing on workers. For two weeks in January, they had to detour to Lake Elsinore, at the highway’s eastern end, adding 40 to 55 miles to their trips.
Some stayed in Lake Elsinore motels. Others slept in their cars in the parking lot.
Nakamoto called the road closure “freakish.”
“We’ve had heavy rains before and the road hasn’t fallen apart,” he said.
Nakamoto said he didn’t have a breakdown of how much the closure may have cost Nichols Institute. Insurance matters are being handled by Quest officials at the company’s Teterboro, N.J., headquarters, he said.
“Our mission was really totally focused on what do we needed to do to take care of the patient samples that were coming in every day and making sure that happened seamlessly,” said Carl Burgess, Nichols’ director of customer operations who served as crisis coordinator during the road closure.
“It was a process of identifying those people who were critical to the operation, the samples that were critical to our clients out there and ensuring that we got the right people to the right samples (in order) to get them done,” Burgess said.
Nichols Institute sometimes is called the “laboratory’s laboratory” because it runs complex genetic tests that give doctors clues about cancers, hepatitis C and the HIV virus, among other things. About 1,400 people work at the campus.
Driving the winding Ortega Highway to get to Nichols never is simple, even in good weather. But, luckily for Nichols, the road stayed open during last week’s rains.
Trouble is, more wet weather is expected in what already has been an extremely heavy rainy season.
January proved to be a crash course for Nichols, which the company hopes it won’t have to repeat.
On the bright side, the road closure boosted ties with the California Highway Patrol and the California Department of Transportation, according to Burgess.
“If there’s any change going forward, it’s more of a change that’s built on the relationships that really grew as a result of the road closure process,” he said.
When January’s storm first hit, CHP officers escorted Nichols’ workers to the campus. But that stopped when Caltrans shut the road to repair storm damage.
Ortega Highway finally reopened on Jan. 28.
“When the road opened that Friday, literally there was a big cheer from the whole laboratory, and people went back home on the weekend and caught up on their sleep,” Nakamoto said.
The closure, which made national news, boosted the awareness of the tucked-away campus, Burgess said.
“A lot of people do wonder, ‘What do you do out there?'” he said. “It’s kind of an unusual-looking facility to be out this far. So people have a lot of things in their minds as to what might be happening there.”
Nichols Institute’s customers include hospitals, women’s doctors, endocrinologists and infectious disease physicians around the world.
The facility is named for founder Al Nichols, a doctor who started it in 1971 in Wilmington. Nichols proved to be a pioneer for the medical testing industry, creating a centralized lab for running complex tests for doctors everywhere.
In 1980, Nichols moved the business to San Juan Capistrano, laying the groundwork for what would become the Ortega facility on 100 acres he bought from the O’Neill family ranch.
Nichols eventually took the business public. New York’s Corning Inc. bought it for $325 million in 1994 and spun off its testing business as Quest three years later.
Nichols died in 2002 in Colorado, nearly a decade after stepping aside as Nichols Institute’s chief executive.
Today, Quest also has Nichols Institute Diagnostics in San Clemente’s Talega masterplanned community, which makes test kits and reagents.
The company is one of two sizable players left in the medical laboratory industry. Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, based in Burlington, N.C., Quest’s largest rival, bought Irvine-based US Labs Inc., a smaller rival, for $155 million late last year.
