Are coronavirus masks here to stay? Military orders millions from Puerto Rico firm
A Puerto Rican garment maker has won the largest coronavirus-related defense contract on the island to produce as many as 23 million cloth masks for what the U.S. military sees as the “new abnormal” in its operations.
It is one of three contracts for cloth masks awarded by the Defense Logistics Agency since the outbreak of COVID-19 and reflects the Pentagon’s shift in planning for what senior military leaders are now calling “the new abnormal” - a belief that the coronavirus will be a factor in military operations for many months to come.
“The ‘new abnormal’ I’m defining as living and operating with a cyclical virus until we get a vaccine,” Gen. David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff, told reporters at the Pentagon this week. “All the projections are, you know, no vaccine for upwards of a year. So that means we’ve got to refine our ability to survive and operate and do the missions the nation requires.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper on April 5 directed that anyone on Defense Department property “will wear cloth face coverings when they cannot maintain six feet of social distance in public areas or work centers.” His guidance applied to all service members, civilians and contractors.
The masks are one part of a “new normal,” at least for now, Pentagon chief spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said at a media briefing Friday.
“I don’t have any guidance on whether masks are here to stay,” Hoffman said. “I think that will be something our medical providers will look at.”
The three cloth mask contracts include up to $86 million to Aurora Industries LLC in Camuy, Puerto Rico, and about $1.5 million each to Atlantic Diving Supply in Virginia Beach, Va., and Outdoor Research in Seattle..
Both smaller contracts are for about 250,000 to 300,000 cloth masks each, to be produced in the next two to three months. The much larger Puerto Rico contract is for 1 million to 23 million cloth masks to be produced through December 2020.
“We are trying to help the DOD in many ways,” Aurora CEO Humberto Zacapa said in a brief phone interview from Puerto Rico. The company had been closed down because of the coronavirus threat and is just in the process of ramping back up its operations, he said.
“We had been closed, even though we are a critical industry, we had been closed for several weeks and now we are trying to get back on our feet. And one of the ways to get back on our feet is to help in the pandemic,” he said.
The company is a federal contractor for uniforms and received the new mask contract on April 8, but has not yet begun production because it is still working on the design, Zacapa said.
The masks made in Puerto Rico will be used by the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps and Navy.
The Defense Logistics Agency in a statement said Aurora was chosen “because it is a small business, it was already setting up a production line to manufacture cloth face masks, and had fabric on order. The firm also had the ability to leverage other small business manufacturers located nearby to increase production if needed.”
The $86 million contract to Aurora Industries is the largest coronavirus-related defense contract on the island, and dwarfs the $945,000 total value of the 18 other coronavirus-related defense contracts that have been awarded to Puerto Rican firms, according to contract records posted to a government database run by the General Services Administration.
The GSA cautions that the federal database may be incomplete given shifting responses to COVID-19 needs.
A search of the Federal Procurement Data System, a government database run by the GSA that records all federal contracts, shows that Aurora has contracted with the Defense Logistics Agency since at least 2013 to produce military uniforms.
Federal contracting data also shows that from 2013 to 2020, Aurora won contracts worth a total of roughly $330 million. The $86 million face mask contract would be its largest individual contract with the agency if fully realized.
Beyond its location in Puerto Rico, which is still recovering from Hurricane Maria devastation, Aurora has a unique corporate structure for a defense contractor. It takes its name from the polar lights and corporate documents on the island show its founding parent company is the Sitnasuak Native Corporation in Nome, Alaska.
Sitnasuak is known as an Alaskan Native Village Corporation, a special designation created by Congress in 1971. It is the largest of 16 such companies in the Bering Sea region and operates as a for-profit entity with a board of directors that oversees companies involved in fuel storage, commercial real estate, retailing and seven businesses involved in making tactical apparel.
Shirsho Dasgupta contributed reporting.
This story was originally published April 24, 2020 at 4:41 PM.
