As was mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, one of Chelan Fruit’s packing facilities was destroyed by wildfires around the town of Chelan, in the north-central part of Washington state.
“One facility was destroyed and another facility in the nearby vicinity is dealing with some communications disruption,” says Mac Riggan with Chelan Fresh. “As soon as internet has been restored, hopefully by Wednesday, we can ship out of that facility again. All other facilities are fully operational. The facility that was destroyed won’t be restored for a year or two,” Riggan added.
“We are having to re-shuffle the packaging capacity from this one plant to other facilities, but I expect we are fully back up and running by Wednesday. Right now, we are dealing with our customers. We are informing them about the impact and working hard to minimalize disruption to them.”
The affected facility has 800 employees. About 150,000 empty wood bins went up in flames and so did 450,000 packed boxes of apples. The far majority was from last year’s crop as Chelan Fruit only starting picking new fruit last week.
