Business View Magazine | December 2020

125 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2020 NTERNAT IONAL L IQUID TERMINALS ASSOC I AT ION ( I LTA) masks. So we bought 1000 masks and divvied them up among the smaller members. From March on, for two months, we met with the industry every week to find out what was happening and what they needed. And we did a survey of the membership so they could benchmark how they were preparing their facilities.” Clay believes that an association’s best use is as a convenor of the industry and that’s where the real knowledge lies. Early in the pandemic, on every call ILTA members had questions, and four or five others would speak up with answers, or at least shared their experiences. In that regard, ILTA was a valuable conduit for its members, and in those instances where they needed flexibility with regulations, the association was their voice, explaining to the regulator why that was warranted during this exceptional time. ILTA had to postpone their annual conference and trade show this year, but Clay is excited to announce that it will take place in October of 2021. She admits, “Nothing can take the place of weekly industry calls to share real-time information – peer to peer – with terminals in different states about operational, health and safety, and regulatory compliance issues. ILTA membership ranges from big companies like Marathon and Phillips 66, to family-owned businesses with 20 employees, and everything in between. In the early days of the pandemic, some of the smaller companies, in particular, were having difficultly sourcing personal protective equipment even though the government considered terminal employees essential workers. “Employees of our companies have to be physically be on site, no matter what is happening with COVID, to load fuel and help train drivers to operate the machinery so they can load their own trucks,” says Clay. “To help out, ILTA sourced and sent out masks to our members. We became what we jokingly called the ‘mask fulfillment center’ because you couldn’t order 20 masks from Amazon at the time. It was a minimum order of 1000, and our small companies couldn’t justify that. Also, there was incredible price inflation for