With only two days remaining until Christmas, the U.S. Postal Service’s Pennwood Processing & Distribution Center in Cranberry is nearing the end of its busiest time of the year.
Steve Tarpey, the plant manager, said the facility’s peak time starts the day after Thanksgiving and goes until about a week before Christmas. During this year’s rush, the center processed about 5.4 million packages.
“We’re laser-focused on mail to the world,” Tarpey said.
The center receives packages and parcels from anywhere between State College in the east and Youngstown in the west and Erie in the north and Morgantown, W. Va., in the south. The packages then are sorted and distributed to their various destinations.
The busiest time for the center is between 8:30 p.m. and 3:45 a.m., after all of the day’s packages have arrived. Employees push loaded carts across the facility and make sure everything’s running smoothly on the many machines carrying and sorting the packages. The sorting machines take a photo of the barcodes on the packages and move them to different areas. The biggest machine is able to sort up to 12,000 packages per hour. Trucks start to leave the facility at 5 a.m., and Tarpey insists nothing is left for the next day.
The holiday crush can result in 12-hour workdays. Tarpey tries to alleviate some of this stress by holding a holiday decorating contest, encouraging each department to decorate its station however the workers want. As a result, the facility is filled with twinkle lights, garland and inflatable Santas and other characters. At exception mail, the winning department, there’s even a fake fireplace and a small TV playing “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
Said Tarpey, “I try to make it so it doesn’t have to be terrible to come to work.”
He also makes other preparations, such as hiring additional staff starting in July, starting the sorting machines at noon instead of the usual 5 p.m., and renting forklifts to carry large amounts of mail around the 250,000-square-foot facility so it gets to where it needs to be by Christmas.
“This is what we do,” he said. “This is our month to shine.”
Emily is a photojournalist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but she's currently on strike.