Roof collapse halts hanger production at M&B plant
Six employees were injured and production was halted for over a week at the M&B Hangers facility in Leeds, AL, after a large portion of the roof caved in.
Sections covering approximately 25,000 of the building’s 100,000 sq. ft. collapsed on the morning of Thursday, May 15, sounding similar
to bombs exploding.
“It was very scary,” said M&B Hangers CEO and President Milt Magnus. “It looked like we had been bombed, also. Our building is a tilt-wall concrete
building and the roof is concrete slabs, along with metal beams, that fell.
That’s a lot of weight.”
Magnus hoped that the company would be up and running again about a week after
the incident, but the process was slow even though a lot of people were working
hard to get the company back on its feet.
Once M&B returns to full production, the company will continue producing hangers at
twice the rate it did only six months ago.
Magnus added that he hopes the U.S. Department’s of Commerce’s decision to impose a tariff on Chinese manufactured hangers will brighten the
future for M&B, as well as other American hanger manufacturers.
“It would be great to be competing against other American producers,” he said.
“We’re working hard now, and with God’s help, we’ll make it through all of this,” he said. “I appreciate everybody’s understanding. All of our people are persevering and they want to see this
thing through. We just have great people and they deserve a chance.”
Four of the injured workers were regular M&B employees who escaped with only minor cuts and bruises. Additionally, two
contracted employees were taken to the hospital. One was treated for a broken
leg and the other for a broken arm.
All six were released later that same day.
The contracted employees were working to repair a damaged support column for the
roof that had been hit by a forklift weeks earlier.
What caused the collapse is still unknown.
“There is an investigation going on, so I don’t want to speculate,” said Magnus, who added that it was fortunate that the collapse did not occur
over a more densely populated area of the factory.
“We had a lot of people think quickly, and thank goodness it was over our
warehouses and not our production area where people are,” he noted.
Within a day of the collapse, contractors had already formulated a game plan for
the reconstruction and started to clear out the area.
“They cleaned the debris out on Saturday and Sunday and finished up Monday
morning,” Magnus said the week after the accident. “They are putting temporary walls up to keep the rest of the plant dry and then,
after they do that, we’ll turn power on to the production facility and hopefully start Thursday
afternoon or Friday morning doing all of our safety checks and getting back
into operations over the weekend.”
