(Lake Park)– A fire has temporarily halted productions at Northern Iowa Diecast in Lake Park. The Lake Park, Milford and Spirit Lake Fire Departments were called to the scene a little after 6:00 this (Wed.) morning. Jeff Skalbeck, President of Northern Iowa Diecast, tells KUOO news the plant was evacuated and no one was hurt…
“Everybody got out just fine. That was on third shift and that’s a fairly small shift for us, so there was probably about 20 people in the plant at the time.”
Skalbeck says the fire was in the plant’s main production area…
“It was in our casting department. We have, basically we do zinc and aluminum diecasting and so there’s obviously a lot of furnaces there with hot metal and that type of thing in, so it’s an area that you have to be careful around.”
Skalbeck says firefighters were able to quickly bring the fire under control once they were able to safely gain access to that area. He expressed his gratitude to them…
“And yeah, we just really want to give a shout out to them. They were very professional. They even had the ladder truck out here because obviously it’s a fairly large plant. It allowed them to get up on the roof there a little easier. Yeah, they just did an excellent job.”
Skalbeck says they aren’t sure yet on the exact impacts the fire will have on production…
“No, we won’t know that until we get back in the plant. We’ve been contacting our customers this morning to let them know we won’t be shipping any more this morning, or this week. Hopefully we’ll be back in the plant here later today and kind of have a better idea then of what this means for us in the next coming days.”
Skalbeck says employees have been told there will be no production at Northern Iowa Diecast the rest of the week.
About 100 people work at the facility.
Photos courtesy Dana Klontz
