From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

CHAPTER FIVE
The home FronT
San Francisco had its “Great Fire.” So did Chicago. And so did McCain. On the last
day of the 1980s, Sunday, December 31, 1989, much of the Florenceville factory was
destroyed by a fire that raged all day in bitterly cold temperatures.
It started at 5:45 am. Workers were building a new freezing tunnel when a spark
from a cutting torch set fire to old insulation. Smoke engulfed the site and the fire was
quickly out of control. Paul Dean, a food scientist and long-time McCain employee,
rushed to the scene to help, as did the town’s volunteer fire department, company
employees, and other Florenceville residents.
“It was twenty-five or thirty below zero, and the wind was blowing,” Dean recalls.
“It was so cold that by the time the firefighters got the water out of the hydrant, a lot
of the hoses had frozen.” Eventually, firefighters were able to use a hook and ladder
truck to place hoses above the roof of the plant. They punched holes in the roof and
hosed water through them, dousing much of the fire.
Because of the efforts of firefighters from fifteen communities in New Brunswick
and Maine, the blaze was extinguished before it could spread to the adjacent corporate
offices. But two freezing tunnels, french fry and vegetable packaging areas,
and three cold storage rooms were destroyed. Although the potato processing line
wasn’t affected, production had to stop until the rest of the plant could be rebuilt.
But McCain’s customers didn’t notice, since extra shifts at nearby McCain plants in
Grand Falls, New Brunswick, and Easton, Maine, took up the slack. The American
authorities cooperated by letting Florenceville employees cross the border to work in
Maine. Those who weren’t needed in the other plants worked on the cleanup and the
$25 million rebuilding project in Florenceville.
About four-and-a-half-million pounds of food with a retail value of $4 million
the home front
FACING PAGE: Planting time
in Alberta, in the bottomland
of the Oldman River valley.
125