TOWER— It was the worst possible time for a fire at Lamppa Manufacturing in Tower. With the heating season here, orders for sauna stoves and wood furnaces were running strong and production had kicked into high gear.
“It’s always bad timing for a fire, but this is kind of our peak season,” said plant manager Dale Horihan. “We had been running about four-to-six weeks for delivery. This could stretch that out to eight-to-ten weeks.”
The production crew had just returned on Monday morning when an apparent malfunction with a welding gun sent an electrical surge through the building’s interior metal sheathing, burning through the plastic vapor barrier and igniting the wooden wall studs used in the six-year-old building’s construction.
The fire was confined to the northeast corner of the building’s weld shop, but the blaze quickly filled the plant with smoke, forcing an evacuation of the plant’s workers, who stood for hours in the parking lot watching as firefighters tried to get a handle on the situation. Firefighters used large ventilation fans to clear the smoke from the building, allowing them to work inside without cumbersome air packs and masks.
Horihan said their workers performed professionally and followed their protocols for handling a fire and evacuating safely. He also credited a prompt response from area fire departments. “They arrived quickly and were excellent,” he said.
That prompt response from several area departments kept the fire from spreading into the building’s attic, which would have presented a much greater challenge for firefighters and substantially lengthened the time to get the plant back in operation.
Horihan is hopeful the plant will be able to restart production within a week or two, although the requirements of the fire investigation could lengthen that timeline. Company officials have stressed the need to get things back up and running as quickly as possible.
Horihan said he’s still waiting to find out whether insurance will cover payroll costs over the period the plant is temporarily shut down.
The fire was a freak accident in a building that should be largely fire resistant. The walls are sheathed with metal inside and out and the materials stored within the plant itself consist predominantly of heavy steel. But once the high-voltage power from the welding gun conducted through the metal sheathing, it appears it ignited the plastic vapor barrier that had been installed over the wall insulation, according to Horihan. That was enough to get the building’s wood framing burning and it quickly began to smolder and smoke. Because the fire was within the walls, firefighters had to use metal saws and grinders to cut through the sheathing to extinguish the hot spots.
An estimate of the cost of the damage was not available as of press time. The building is owned by the Tower Economic Development Authority which will be overseeing the repairs. TEDA officials had already reached out to insurance adjusters and contractors in hopes of getting the plant back up and fully functional as quickly as possible.
Lamppa Manufacturing currently employs 18 workers. The company manufacturers sauna stoves, both electric and wood-burning, as well as the cleanest-burning wood furnaces in the U.S.
Several area fire departments responded to Monday’s incident, including Tower, Breitung, Greenwood, Vermilion Lake, Eagles Nest, and Virginia, which brought a ladder truck and personnel to the scene. The Tower Ambulance was also posted on standby at the scene while the Breitung PD handled traffic control.