FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — After a devastating flood swept through their shop, one group of barbers has taken their clippers to the curbside.
“We’re not trying to stop cause that will slow us down, and we can’t really afford that at all. We’ve been working hard for five years, and there’s no way we can stop now,” said Hector Arenas.
Arenas owns Diamond Pressure Barber Supplies, one of ten businesses near Ashlan and Willow flooded in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve.
This video shows the chaos they encountered when they arrived, forced to step over pieces of their collapsed ceiling.
Owners tell us a clogged water pipe was the culprit.
“That was everything we had, we literally put everything we had into buying another chair, to buy another station. We buy it piece by piece,” Arenas told Action News.
And now, more than 20 days later, that ceiling is still fragmented, but Arenas says it won’t stop them from cutting hair.
“We’ve been through everything, we’ve had to cut hair outside before, it’s our roots. It’s what we know, it doesn’t stop anything. We can still be out here and we can still cut,” he said.
He and his team worked outside through the COVID pandemic.
Today, they’re outside from eight in the morning to five in the evening, or as long as the sun allows.
And they’re not the only ones. Just a couple doors down, Bobaology Tea House has also moved its operation outdoors.
Exposed wiring still sits above their dining area.
But Arenas knows they can’t work like this for long, and is still waiting for his landlord to answer critical questions about insurance.
“Until I see that my floors are being replaced, or my walls, or until I get my equipment covered, that’s when I’ll feel safe again,” Arenas said.
Action News did reach out to the business’s landlord, who tells us she’s done everything in her power up to this point and hopes to get her tenants back inside as soon as possible.
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