Just two years after a fire at a Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Holcomb, KS, decimated beef slaughter, another fire struck at a JBS beef plant in Grand Island, NE. However, while the Tyson fire shuttered beef production and impacted the cattle markets for months, the JBS fire had much shorter-term impacts.
On the evening of Sunday, Sept. 12, a fire started in the roof of the rendering portion of the JBS facility. Grand Island firefighters reached the scene around 9:45 p.m. and fought the flames into Monday.
“Fortunately, JBS is very modular, so if one area has an issue, for the most part it doesn’t affect the other areas,” Cory Schmidt, chief of the Grand Island Fire Department, told Reuters.
While the 2019 Tyson fire closed the plant for months due to the destruction, the fire at the JBS plant ceased production for only one day. Slaughter and fabrication shifts did not work on Monday, and the projected national slaughter number for the day was 114,000 head, several thousand head short of the typical 120,000 head.
By Tuesday, the plant was up and running again, and the daily slaughter was estimated to be back to usual numbers. The plant has the slaughter capacity for about 5 percent of the U.S. cattle supply, or 6,000 head per day.
A cause for the fire was not given. — Anna Miller, WLJ managing editor
