Atwood rendering plant resumes business after fire

Monday, December 22, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

Just days after a fire flattened main the rendering plant of Atwood Resources Inc. on Highway 23 southwest of Listowel and caused more than $10 million in damage, the company is back in business and continuing to pick up deadstock.

Tom Smith, who owns the business with his parents, Dave and Cathy, says “we have trucks out there today (Monday) and we’re trying to get service back as soon as possible to all our areas.” He says their phone lines are currently down but phone repair crews are working to restore service.

He advised customers to keep trying the regular lines and there’s also a cell phone line they’re using for the business. It’s (519) 897-2823.

To handle the picked up animals, Tom Smith says he’s working with some landfill sites and a deadstock processor out of province. “Our pick up service is back on stream and we’re trying to offer the same service we had prior to the fire.”

The fire started in the 14,000-square-foot main rendering plant early Friday morning. North Perth Fire crews were called to the blaze at 1:43 a.m. Crews from West Perth, Perth East and Grey Township helped North Perth firefighters knock down the blaze.

North Perth Fire Chief Ed Smith, who is no relation to the Smiths that own Atwood Resources, says “we didn’t declare the fire under control until about noon time on Friday.” He declined to say where exactly in the building the fire started.

Forty-eight firefighters from the North Perth fire department were on the scene. Ed Smith says he doesn’t have a number for manpower from the other departments.

The company employs 35 people; four were in the rendering plant and one was in the gasification plant when the fire started. They all escaped uninjured. There were also no injuries to any firefighters.

Tom Smith says no cause for the fire has been found. The main building where the fire started is “totally gone,” he notes, adding they haven’t yet been able to deterime if any equipment can be salvaged. They have cranes and other equipment on site dismantling what’s left of the wood and steel main building structure.

The fire didn’t hit two other buildings on the site, including the gasification plant built last year. The other undamaged building was used for truck storage and maintenance, and the Smiths plan to use that building to set up deadstock processing.

The company received a $6 million interest free loan from the federal government last year to help build and install the gasification system to dispose of specified risk material from animal slaughtering. In the plant, animal meat and bones are continuously heated in a chamber and reduced to a very small pile of ash. The process has cut the company’s waste going to landfills, and the heat from the plant was used as energy to operate the rendering plant.

Tom Smith says they had to shut the power down to the gasification building “so we don’t know what the damage is inside the new gasification plant as of yet.”

Officials don’t yet know how the fire stated. Tom Smith says officials with the Fire Marshal’s office haven’t determined that “and the insurance investigator was undetermined.”

Ed Smith says the fire is still under investigation.

The Smiths plan to rebuild the facility. Tom is the third generation to be part of the business, which was started by his grandfather in 1966. The company, which handles all species, processes about 80 per cent of all bovine deadstock collected in Ontario and 90 per cent of all specified risk material from animal slaughtering that is collected in Ontario. BF

– With files from BetterFarming.com