Hexpol fire update: Tennessee plant 'a total loss'

JONESBOROUGH, Tenn.—Hexpol N.A. has been working hard the past month to re-source materials for customers the custom mixer serviced from its Jonesborough facility, which was hit by a Jan. 7 fire that left the plant basically a "total loss."

Firefighting crews fought the blaze for more than 12 hours, with one employee hospitalized and the other 22 workers safely evacuated from the building.

Hexpol N.A. President Ken Bloom said the staff member who was injured currently is working through rehabilitation to deal with burn issues.

It was a mixer fire, he said, where product caught fire in the mixer and ended up spreading to other parts of the facility, including the raw material inventory area.

"Even though the sprinkler system came on, (the fire) was just very aggressive and continued to spread," Bloom said. "We lost our big mixer line and almost all the raw materials. We did salvage some equipment in other parts of that plant that weren't as badly damaged—one intermesh line and a strainer, and some lab equipment. But overall, it's a total loss from the standpoint of the plant.

Fire and insurance investigators continue to look for the cause, according to the Hexpol executive. The compound that was running in the mixer was a stable compound with a long history of successful processing.

"We've run it for this customer for millions and millions of pounds," Bloom said. "There is something else that happened, either in the system, or something failed in the control valve."

Hexpol does have enough capacity across the U.S., but he said there has been much work involved to re-source or move product around to other facilities, citing the need to gain needed approvals and certifications. In addition, the supply chain worked diligently to replace the amount of raw materials lost to the fire, something that is difficult in a tight market.

"We've had to move 882 parts, and we've done that successfully in less than 30 days," he said. "Customers have been absolutely a pleasure to work with, and our team has worked 24/7, and we've not had one outage or a situation where a customer shut down an assembly line."

The Jonesborough site had about 100 employees, including hourly and salaried staff. Some of those have moved to other company facilities while others have been laid off and are receiving severance and other support from Hexpol. There still are a handful of workers on site, Bloom said, to support cleanup efforts and work on transitioning efforts for customers.

With production moved to other facilities, staffing these sites in a timely fashion has been difficult. "You would think in the current environment, we should be able to find people fairly easily for our other plants, but it's been a challenge," he said. "But we have to, of course, add shifts to these plants to support the increased volume that has transferred over."

Hexpol still hasn't made a long-term decision on what its recovery plan is, but Bloom expects a decision in the next month. If the mixer doesn't rebuild in Jonesborough, he said it likely will need to invest in a couple of its other factories, either by bringing in new equipment or constructing an addition.

And given all the Hexpol N.A. team has had to deal with since the beginning of 2020, Bloom said they did a tremendous job in trying times. "We've stayed open at every single facility, even in Mexico," he said. "When things were locking down as tight as could be, we still didn't miss an order, and never shut a customer down.

"I can't wait to manage this team under normal circumstances. We've managed it through nothing but stress for 13 months. I can't wait to manage them when there's just your normal business stuff and not all these extraordinary things going on."