Less than a month after a massive fire destroyed its million-square-foot warehouse in Tracy, medical supplies giant Medline says it has leased another facility nearly as large in the city and will add additional space in Stockton.
With the new leases, Medline won’t be tied up trying to rebuild after the June blaze that devastated its warehouse on Promontory Parkway. The company’s new Tracy location, an existing 925,000-square-foot warehouse on Sugar Road, is less than 10 miles away from the burned-out space and available for immediate occupancy.
The Stockton warehouse, which will be located on Logistics Drive, is smaller — 709,000-square-feet, but still about the size of 12 football fields. It will open in January, the company said Monday.
Medline, based in Northfield, Illinois, is moving quickly to replace its lost capacity — and potentially even increase it — in order to maintain its healthcare industry customers in Northern California.
“Securing and standing up a new facility in less than one month — and increasing our customer-facing footprint in Northern California by an incredible 45% — speaks to our incredible dedication to making healthcare run better every day for our customers,” Medline CEO Jim Boyle said in a statement.
To serve Southern California, Medline is building a million-square-foot warehouse in Perris, east of Los Angeles in Riverside County. All told, the company expects to have 5 million square feet of warehouse space in California within a year.
The Tracy fire clearly interrupted the company’s growth. Flames tore through the Tracy warehouse, which stored a wide range of medical supplies, on June 11. An army of firefighters were initially hampered by dry hydrants, leaving the blaze to burn for more than a day.
A smoke plume was visible from Stockton and across much of San Joaquin County during the conflagration, with plumes still rising from the site for several days after the initial blaze. Fire officials said the warehouse was a total loss.
Amid the disaster, the company said it has done its best to maintain a flow of products to hospitals and other healthcare facilities.
“We are doing everything we can to meet the needs of our customers as they seek to best serve their patients,” Doug Golwas, Medline’s chief commercial officer, said in a statement.
“We are grateful for the collaborative teamwork from healthcare providers across the West Coast over the past few weeks as we worked to get them what they need, when and where they need,” he added.