A Christmas Eve fire destroyed Arway Linen’s plant and half of its inventory. Yet the family-owned company was back in business by Dec. 26.

Arway Linen has been busy this week, as usual, processing 200,000 pounds of laundry and delivering clean tablecloths, napkins, uniforms, and aprons to its 1,000 restaurant clients across the Philadelphia area.

If customers hadn’t seen the news stories, they might never have known that the company’s Frankford plant burned down on Christmas Eve.

No one was injured in the blaze — thankfully the last employees had left hours earlier, company executives said — but it destroyed about half of Arway’s one-million-piece inventory. It also left the 45-year-old family-owned business without a place to sort, launder, and process linens or to load them onto trucks for delivery.

But somehow Arway didn’t miss a day of service. With the help of other local linen companies, the company was back up and running by Dec. 26, delivering orders to its restaurant, country club, and senior-living clients.

“Our customers rely on us,” said Steve Curtis, Arway’s director of sales and marketing. “They have reservations, banquets, weddings, holidays.”

Around 9:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Mark Harad-Oaks, Arway’s director of operations, was at a family gathering when managing partner Mario Stagliano called: The alarms were going off at the plant, and their maintenance guy said they might want to get there as soon as possible.

Harad-Oaks tried and failed to load footage from the facility’s security cameras.

He told his family, including his father-in-law, Keith Harad, an Arway founder, “I gotta go, Arway is on fire,’” Harad-Oaks said. But “I didn’t know how on fire it was.”

When Harad-Oaks and other executives arrived, they were met with a horrifying sight. The plant was engulfed. The three-alarm fire would take 17 hours to extinguish. The cause is under investigation.

“It was gut wrenching to stand there next to drivers and people from the laundry side who live in the neighborhood … and just stare at this building that has been home,” Harad-Oaks said. “Many of us spent more hours a week there than with our own families.”

After a long, emotional night, Arway’s team said goodbye to the charred remains of the plant.

“Everyone was trying to get home to not ruin their kids’ Christmas morning,” Curtis said.

But in the background, the wheels were already turning on a plan to keep deliveries on track the following day.

Arway arranged to temporarily work out of a King of Prussia textile linen company, which Arway purchases from, and drove its 25 trucks — which were undamaged in the fire — to the Montgomery County plant for the next morning’s deliveries.

Arway spent a lot of money on brand new products to replace what was lost, with Curtis and Harad-Oaks declining to share a dollar amount. The few items that survived the blaze were able to be washed clean of the smoke smell, thanks to the power of the commercial washing machines, Curtis said. Printers, computers, bins, and truck keys were also destroyed in the fire. The Arway crew had to improvise, recutting keys and printing order sheets and other paperwork on small printers at home and at local office stores.

By 5 a.m. on Dec. 26, the drivers headed out on their normal routes, with only some floor mats and personalized kitchen uniforms delayed. And later that day, Arway had found a 10,000-square-foot depot over the bridge in South Jersey where the company can work for the foreseeable future, and management is working with the union to retain as many of its 130 Frankford employees as possible.

Arway executives are hoping their new state-of-the-art facility in Port Richmond, which was being worked on prior to the fire, might be ready by the end of 2025, Curtis and Harad-Oaks said.

For now though, they’re putting their heads down and working. Every day, tens of thousands of pounds of linen products are coming back to the facility, ready to be laundered and returned to the rotation. The crew is running on little sleep, Curtis and Harad-Oaks said, but they are propelled by the pride in what they have accomplished over the past week.

“We’re just a resilient team,” Curtis said. “As it was happening, I don’t think there was a doubt in anyone’s mind that we were going to figure it out.”