Fires Destroy New Zealand Egg Farm and Canadian Seafood Plant

Fires Destroy New Zealand Egg Farm and Canadian Seafood Plant

Last week, my colleague Mary Chastain reported that a massive fire incinerated a Connecticut egg farm.

A search of recent news stories shows no cause for that fire has been reported. However, “experts” assure us there will be no spike in egg prices as a result of this incident.

“It’s hard to say until we get a little further on in the week but I can’t imagine it’s going to shake things up too much, to be honest,” Karen Rispoli, egg market analyst at price reporting agency Urner Barry, based in Toms River, N.J., said.

The Connecticut Department of Agriculture appeared more certain, noting that the birds lost to the fire were a tiny sliver of the more than 372 million egg laying hens in the United States. The impact on egg prices was expected to be “minimal to none at this time,” the department said, in a statement Monday.

However, the US isn’t the only country that has recently experienced massive fires at food production facilities. A fire at an egg-laying farm in New Zealand has claimed the lives of 50,000 hens.

The figure was earlier reported as 75,000 hens, but has since been revised, Zeagold Nutrition confirmed this afternoon.

The fire on Old Rd, Orini, was reported to Fire and Emergency about 7.45am this morning.

When FENZ crews arrived at the scene, the fire was already “well-involved”.

“All 12 staff members on site are safe and unharmed,” Zeagold Nutrition chief executive John McKay said in a statement.

He initially said the fire affected four of the 12 barn layer sheds on the property, but later clarified that only two were affected, with the damage less extensive than initially reported.

As in Connecticut, the cause of the fire has yet to be determined. Interestingly, the impacted areas were a “new build.”

“That’s the puzzling thing with this. Obviously it’s a new build, it’s fully compliant. We’ll have the Fire and Emergency inspector back on site with us later this morning, and just going through that. At this stage, we still don’t know what caused the fire.”

Until they do, he said it was not clear if the fire could have been prevented.

“It’s very, very rare to have an incident like this – particularly in new buildings. That’s why we’ve got to get into this investigation.”

But egg farms aren’t the only facilities that have been destroyed by fire. A seafood processing plant near Cap-Pelé, in southeastern New Brunswick, Canada, is a “total loss” after a blaze broke out late last week.

W.E. Acres Crabmeal Ltd., in Portage, caught fire around 2 p.m., said Ronald Cormier, Cap-Pelé’s fire chief.

He said the fire was still burning as of around 6:15 p.m. but there are only hot spots now. He said six fire departments responded to the scene, and firefighters will remain on site for the next couple of hours.

Cormier said the cause of the fire is still unknown, but he said it doesn’t appear to be arson.

While it is heartening to learn that arson might not cause the seafood plant’s fire, it is vital to determine the cause of these fires and relay that information to an uneasy public.

Here is the data related to food facility fires in this county, as published by the National Fire Protection Association last year:

“There have been approximately 20 fires in U.S. food processing facilities in the first 4 months of 2022, which is not extreme at all and does not signal anything out of the ordinary,” NFPA spokeswoman Susan McKelvey told us. “The recent inquiries around these fires appears to be a case of people suddenly paying attention to them and being surprised about how often they do occur. But NFPA does not see anything out of the ordinary in these numbers.”

The NFPA gets its data from the National Fire Incident Reporting System and its own data sets, neither of which provide numbers specific to food processing plants. But the data does provide annual averages on fires that could be related to those types of facilities, McKelvey said.

For example, she said, the annual averages of fires that have occurred in the U.S. between 2015 and 2019 are as follows:

All manufacturing and processing facilities: 5,308
Agriculture: 961
Grain or livestock storage: 1,155
Refrigerated storage: 35

Here’s hoping there are reasons not related to arson or terrorism for these fires, and that corrective measures can be taken by the agricultural and food processing industries to prevent similar blazes in the future.

The concern about these incidents shows that the American public is extremely worried about food security. Given the state of leadership in this country, and misinformation offered by “experts” in other public interest areas, that worry is not likely to dissipate soon.

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