B4
THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2022
Farmers, customers scramble after fl our mill fi re
A major employer
in Pendleton
By MATTHEW WEAVER
Capital Press
PENDLETON — Pacifi c North-
west wheat farmers are beginning to
cope with the fallout from a massive fi re
Wednesday that left the Grain Craft fl our
mill a “total loss.”
The company is working with farm-
ers to handle the excess supply, said
Natalie Faulkner, director of communi-
cations for Grain Craft, based in Chatta-
nooga, Tennessee.
The building was more than 100
years old, Faulkner said. Twenty-two
employees worked in the mill. There
were no injuries in the fi re. Pendleton
Police Chief Chuck Byram said the mill
was a “total loss.”
The company does not disclose the
production capacity of the building,
Faulkner said. The extent of the damage
and possibility of rebuilding are not yet
known, she added.
“It’s still an active situation. W e are
still evaluating everything, just trying
to understand the cause and circum-
stances,” Faulkner told the Capital Press.
Ben Maney, the president of Oregon
Wheat Growers League, farms north of
Pendleton.
He doesn’t take his grain to the facil-
ity, but “a substantial amount of farm-
ers” in the area do, he told the Capital
Press.
“It’s been a staple for the Pendleton
community for an awfully long time,
mills, “with no visible fl ames,” accord-
ing to a police department statement .
The fi re department responded, extin-
guished the small fi re and remained on
fi re watch.
The fi re subsequently reignited at
about 4 a.m. Wednesday and became
fully engulfed due to the dry grain and
the wooden structure, Byram said.
Employees identifi ed the source of
the fi re, Byram said.
“It happened in the mill itself, with
one of the pieces of equipment, with a
rubber bushing or housing that obvi-
ously got too hot and started the fi re,” he
said.
It’s the middle of harvest, Byram
said, so the mill was processing a lot of
fl our. He didn’t have an exact fi gure, but
said Grain Craft employees estimated
there were “hundreds of thousands of
pounds of processed fl our in the bins.”
There is no estimated cost of damage
yet, he said.
Some surrounding buildings have
been damaged by water and smoke,
Byram said.
The mill plays a “huge” role in the
Pendleton community, he said.
“They’re a major employer. W e are
obviously an agricultural community
that does a lot of dryland wheat farm-
ing,” he said. “Wheat farmers from the
surrounding area bring their wheat in
here to the Pendleton fl our mill. It’s yet
to be determined what the impact is, but
I can gauge it’s going to be signifi cant.”
Pendleton Assistant Fire Chief Tony
Pierotti told the East Oregonian the silos
were full of fi nished grain, so the fuel
load was “extreme.”
TWENTY-TWO
EMPLOYEES WORKED
IN THE MILL. THERE
WERE NO INJURIES
IN THE FIRE.
generations, and it’s always been a cen-
tral location (in) town,” he said.
The fi re is the latest hit for grow-
ers after experiencing severe drought
last year, Maney said. Many crops had
rebounded this year with spring rains.
“A lot of farmers don’t have home
storage, and they can’t store that grain
on their farm,” he said. “For this heart-
breaking event to happen today, it puts
the community and a lot of the farmers
in a tough situation. It hits the commu-
nity hard.”
Jeremy Bunch, CEO of Shepherd’s
Grain, a farmer-owned fl our company,
sent an email to customers about the fi re.
“We are working on a contingency
plan now and getting wheat staged for
movement to another Grain Craft mill,”
Bunch said. “Unfortunately, there will
be an interruption in fl our supply as we
work through these details. We apolo-
gize for the inconvenience this causes.
We are working hard to minimize this
fl our supply interruption and will pro-
vide a timeline update very soon.”
The cause of the fi re was “mechani-
cal failure,” Byram, the police chief, told
the Capital Press.
On Aug. 9, dispatchers received a
report of black smoke coming from the
Kathy Aney/East Oregonian
A massive fi re damaged a fl our mill in Pendleton.
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