Fire swept through a warehouse at the Marshall, Ind., operations of Futurex Industries Inc., on Feb. 19, but production was not impacted at the custom sheet extruder, an executive said.
Nobody was hurt in the afternoon fire, and there were no employees in the warehouse when it caught fire, said Brent Thompson, Futurex vice president. He praised local fire departments. “They did a great job,” he said.
Contacted Feb. 22, Thompson said the fire consumed what he described as an “offsite warehouse” located apart from the sheet extrusion factory in Marshall. He said company officials do not know yet how much material was lost in the blaze. They now are compiling the numbers, for the insurance report, he said.
“It didn't affect our plants in any way whatever,” Thompson said.
Futurex runs three Indiana factories, at Marshall, Terra Haute and the headquarters plant in Bloomingdale, Ind. Thompson said the factories can logistically move material, to keep the company at full operation even in an outage such as the warehouse fire. “We're very flexible in that way,” he said.
Futurex extrudes sheet from a variety of materials, including ABS, high-impact polystyrene, high density polyethylene, high-molecular-weight polyethylene and polypropylene. The sheet goes into thermoforming and fabrication.
News coverage of the plastics fire showed clouds of dark smoke pouring from the warehouse.
Thompson said two resin silos next to the warehouse appear to be OK, but are getting checked out. “They're still trying to sort out the integrity” of the silos, he said.
