Onion Collapse

Weather has been an extraordinary topic for the last month in the Northwest but it has become a main headline in the world of onions. Onion packing plants and onion storage facilities, particularly in Idaho and Oregon have had their roofs collapse due to the weight of snow and rain. I talked with Ken Stewart, sales and operations manager for Four Rivers onion packing plant. Hope it was on Sunday, two weeks ago. We had got quite a bit of snow on our roof that had accumulated with the previous snowstorms and that is actually the day that the snow turned to rain. We had quite a lot of what I call powder snow up on the roof of our packing plant As well as our storage buildings. We have eight or 10 of those that house onions. The roof that came down is the one that was over our packing line. When the rain came and saturated the snow that was on the roof, we did have about 20% to 25% of the roof on the one end collapsed. It collapsed on some of our main equipment but the major problem it has cost for us is that it has rendered our packing line inoperable until we can get the roof replaced. That is most likely several months down the road.