After a massive fire destroyed a large potato chip factory and put about 185 people temporarily out of work in a small New Brunswick town on Friday, the company is already working toward a rebuild.
Ryan Albright, founder and president of Covered Bridge Potato Chips, said his staff is working diligently to get products back on the shelves while trying to develop a plan to eventually resume operations in Hartland, N.B., where the blaze occurred.
“We are working to try and figure out the steps on rebuilding our factory at the same location,” he said in an interview with Global News on Wednesday, adding that his team is “hitting the ground running.”
“How that looks, how long that is, that’s to be determined. We have some guys that are already working on equipment, layout, building design, so we’re running simultaneously in all directions so we can be as fast and effective as we can.”
Albright noted that although the Hartland factory location was considered Covered Bridge’s main production hub, it was one of the company’s smaller buildings.
On Friday evening at about 5:45 p.m., 12 fire departments were dispatched to help combat the massive fire that broke out at one of the town’s largest employers.
The chip plant had a shift ongoing when the fire broke out, but all workers were evacuated safely from the building without injury.
Albright said he was driving to Maine when he received a call that a fire had broken out at his factory.
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“At first, I thought, ‘This was a joke,’” he said, noting that his team “triple-checked” to make sure that all employees were removed from the burning building.
“Before I could say, ‘That’s not funny,’ I could tell in her voice that it was real.”
He said the exact cause of the fire remains unknown.
“There’s nothing left there. The metal is melted. It’s so hot that it destroyed everything. I’m not sure we’ll ever really know, we just know the area it started in,” Albright said.
Shayon Siriwardhana, a supervisor who was running a shift at the time, shared his experience from when the fire broke out during an interview on Saturday.
“We had an incident in the fryer room that escalated to a big fire. We couldn’t control it,” he said, adding that the blaze started in a fryer machine and then spread through the building.
“This is the first time something like this happened.”
‘It was one large family’
Albright said his company is hurting following the incident, and the hardship is being extended throughout the town.
“Within the Covered Bridge team, we have so many families,” he said.
“(There’s) a husband and wife and kids that all worked there, three brothers, there’s so many families…. It was one large family, and everybody is feeling it,” he said.
He said the company is hoping to provide temporary positions for some staff members who were previously employed at the location.
“We’re just taking it day by day right now. Sometimes, we don’t have all the answers for everybody but we’re working as fast as we can to get those answers to people,” Albright said.
He said the community support has made a significant difference in the wake of the fire.
“The first responders and the firefighters did an amazing job when they came and made everyone safe, (they) worked tireless hours to get the fire out,” Albright said.
“The huge outpour of people reaching out … these messages are coming from all over, it’s been really nice. It gives our team a load of confidence to get everything back on track.”
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