Washington Furniture Workers Back On The Job Less Than One Month After Devastating Fire

PONTOTOC, MISS. (WCBI) – Workers at a Pontotoc furniture company are back on the assembly lines, one month after an arsonist destroyed part of the factory.

Jesse Washington is inspecting couches as they come off the production lines at Washington Furniture.

He is head of quality control and like everyone else at the company, he wasn’t building furniture for nearly a month, as production lines were set up in a warehouse on the company’s Pontotoc campus. Washington says getting employees back to work was the top priority.

“That’s why all our supervision, everybody was here, daylight to dark, long as it took, during the three weeks, on Saturdays, whatever we had to do,” Washington said.

The fire on September 25th started in a warehouse filled with inventory.  It spread throughout the company’s 300,000 square foot facility, destroying office space and production lines. The blaze was ruled arson.

As cleanup began, plans were being made to convert an undamaged warehouse so production could start back up. On October 23rd, furniture was once again coming off of the assembly lines.

“Back in September when you’re watching the business burn and factory burn like it did, a lot of stuff crosses your mind, but our leadership quickly instilled in us we’re going to come back and be bigger and stronger than ever, as you are in here today, you can see it’s true.  Three weeks from the fire, we’re back up and running, been manufacturing furniture for almost a week now,” said Vice President of Sales, John Beard.

Employees weren’t the only ones affected by the fire.  Washington Furniture suppliers and customers were also impacted, but now employees are doing what they can to make up for the lost time.

“We getting some kinks worked out with the new set up, everybody trying to get used to that, they keep asking me when we going to get our piece count up, when will we build more,” Washington said.

“A lot of people said it couldn’t be done, but we put forth all the effort in the world to make sure it did,” Beard said.

Washington Furniture plans to build a state of the art manufacturing facility on the site of the plant destroyed by September’s fire.

There is a $15,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the arsonist.