JASPER — Three days after a fire at a furniture factory, the company’s president said Monday all 48 of the plant’s workers will be kept busy until the damaged factory returns to full-scale production.
The accident started Friday morning when a wood panel became trapped in a machine in the finishing room at Indiana Furniture Industries’ flatline plant on County Road 100S, creating friction and a spark, CEO Rich Slayton said. The spark lit a fire in the machine's dust collection unit, which led to an explosion.
The blast collapsed interior walls, ignited the main dust collection unit outside and blew the garage doors off the west end of the factory where the evacuated employees were standing. Two women were taken to the hospital after being knocked down by an airborne door, but both employees, and six others suspected of having been exposed to chemicals, were released from the hospital a few hours after the 7:19 a.m. incident.
Slayton said his full maintenance staff cleaned into the evening on both Friday and Saturday, removing damaged parts while protecting evidence that insurance investigators, who visited Saturday, needed to examine.
“It was amazing Saturday. We had 100 percent of our maintenance people working two or three shifts,” he said. “All of our middle- and upper-management people were arranging for the disposition of employees to other work sites and how to get the customers’ orders filled. It was absolutely amazing to me, the effort that everybody put in to getting back to normalcy. It was an inspiration to see how loyal our employees are.”
To avoid having the workers sit at home waiting for repairs, Slayton said some will be employed to clean the plant, others will take inventories and another group will continue producing furniture in one of the company’s three other plants in Dubois County.
Slayton said the community support has been constant, whether from competitors, neighbors or local businesses offering workers water and food during the cleanup.
Insurance investigators remain unsure how the relatively low-impact finishing machine caused a spark, or how its internal sprinklers failed to douse the flame, Slayton said, but equipment representatives were visiting today to take a closer look.
He said workers from Krempp Lumber Co. were to visit today to examine the structural damage to some of the building’s rafters twisted by the heat of the fire, and to rebuild an interior wall torn down by the explosion.
Slayton hoped to return parts of the plant to limited operation today or tomorrow, with the furniture being assembled at the company’s plant in Dubois. The damaged plant originally was identified by police dispatchers and the media as the company’s laminate facility. That building is adjacent to the flatline facility and was the location from which employees dialed 911.
Workers were lucky the finishing process, which cures the wood using ultraviolet light, did not use solvents, Slayton said, but he credited the company’s focus on safety — not luck — for avoiding what could have been a tragic incident.
“Everybody knew what to do,” he said, “particularly when they saw smoke and realized it wasn’t any kind of a drill. We probably had everybody out in 20 seconds.”
Slayton said he might tweak the company’s evacuation process, however, because some employees, out of habit, walked past several exit doors on their way to the main garage doors at the far west of the plant, the normal gathering area after drills. The finishing room, where the explosion originated, is at the far east end of the plant.
IFI, headquartered at 1224 Mill St., was established in 1905 and was known as Jasper Novelty Works before evolving into a laminate office furniture manufacturer.
In 1993, the plywood facility on CR 100S was constructed. A $1.2 million plant addition went under construction in the fall of 1996 and was finished in the spring of 1997.
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Employees kept busy following Jasper factory fire
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