A manufacturing plant goes up in flames, hundreds left temporarily jobless

PONTOTOC, Miss. (WCBI)- Fire erupting, heavy plumes of smoke billowing from the roof, and firefighters battling a large blaze. That was the alarming sight at Washington Furniture Wednesday morning when a fire broke out.

“We got the call just a few minutes after 10 this morning for a fire in the warehouse,” said Pontotoc Fire Chief Lance Martin. “When we got here the feet of the fire was about 300 feet.”

Chief Martin said the fire started in the warehouse.

Several employees were inside working when the fire broke out, including Michael Dillard who first saw the fire and alerted everyone.

“At first like, they wasn’t understanding what I was saying,” said Dillard. “They thought I was saying a fight, fight, but I was saying fire and then everybody was standing there and I was like no, it’s a fire, it’s a fire. They finally understood what I was saying.”

“As soon as I got right up here about five feet from it, everybody was outside, everybody was cool, calm, collected,” said Tony Farr, who’s worked at the plant for four years.

More than three dozen firefighters worked all through the day putting out the blaze.

Fire crews were able to contain the fire and not let it spread to other parts of the plant or any materials inside the facility.

“The main objective right now is this, the warehouse, it’s lost,” Chief Martin described. “We’re trying to keep it out of the manufacturing part. We’ve set up monitors on the firewall on the interior at this time. We have an excavator on the backside of the building tearing it out as best we can to try and keep it out of the main suite of the plant.”

Washington Furniture is known for making residential upholstery for homes.

The production line at the plant didn’t receive significant damage in the fire, which means, although hundreds of employees are temporarily displaced, plant leaders are confident they’ll be able to have things up and running within the next few weeks.

“This is a big bump in the road but we’re going to be back up and running fairly quick,” said John Beard, VP of sales at Washington Furniture. “We have a lot of our raw materials that were not affected, there’s some smoke damage but outside of that we can be back up and running really quick.”

The State Fire Marshall’s Office is now working to determine the exact cause of the fire.

Plant leaders said they will likely store their products at a different location until a new warehouse is built.