Owen Pattinson, a screen printer at Sun Creations, lays out Big 12 championship t-shirts on a conveyor dryer at the business Monday.

Gene Wayenberg has his team working overtime this week, scrambling to fill orders for NCAA Tournament T-shirts that will be sent across the country.

It hasn’t been easy. His Sun Creations Inc. screen-printing company lost part of its production and warehouse capacity in east Lawrence in Sunday’s storm.

“It couldn’t be worse,” Wayenberg said Monday.

A Sun Creations annex, at 720 E. Ninth St., had been expected to be buzzing Sunday night and throughout the week, helping ease the load on workers printing shirts for all 65 tournament teams on behalf of Prairie Graphics, another Lawrence company that holds an NCAA license.

But the annex is gone now, its roof torn away by wind and the two presses and two blowers inside – total value: $175,000 – damaged beyond repair.

“It’s amazing that it happened on this Monday,” Wayenberg said. “It’s our busiest day of the year.”

Sun Creations isn’t completely out of the game. His crews now are working extra hours to get the shirts made on time, as the company’s main production center, at 826 Pa., escaped the storm relatively unscathed.

Nathan Whitman, standing at center, and Justin Shiney, on ground at left, work at moving a large t-shirt conveyor dryer from a Sun Creations building near 10th and Penn. that was heavily damaged in Sunday's storm.

“It’s not going to cost any business,” Wayenberg said. “It’s just going to take longer to get them all done.”

The same can’t be said for Victory Sportswear, another screen printer nearby. Owner Larry Sinks spent part of his Monday looking up at the sky through a 9-square-foot hole in his roof.

An even bigger problem: losing power to the building until late Monday morning, costing him about $15,000 in sales. He immediately rushed to print 2,700 “March Mayhem” shirts for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which opens the tournament Thursday morning against Oklahoma in Jacksonville, Fla.

“It’s been tough,” Sinks said Monday afternoon. “We were supposed to have most of them printed last night.”