Burton to Import, Donate 500,000 KN95 Masks

Burton Snowboards is doing its part to support health-care workers in the Northeast. The world’s leading snowboard manufacturer, which is based in Burlington, Vt., has committed to donating 500,000 KN95 respirator masks to medical personnel across the Northeast. Burton turned to Fudakin, its longtime snowboard binding factory partner in China, to obtain the masks and UPS Express to fly them to the U.S. The first 48,000 have been delivered and will be distributed to hospitals across the state of Vermont and to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, where the late Jake Burton Carpenter, the company’s founder, spent two months of his life in the ICU battling Miller Fisher Syndrome in 2015. The additional 452,000 masks are in production and are expected to arrive in the next 10-14 days. The Vermont State Emergency Operations Center, with support from the Vermont governor’s office, will deliver 50 percent of the masks to designated hospitals in Boston and New York City where the need is the greatest. “It is a national disgrace that the medical supply chain in this country has not been federalized and that states are competing for desperately needed supplies,” said Donna Carpenter, Burton’s chairman of the board and widow of Jake Burton Carpenter. “This

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