OFS Brands assessing damage after severe wind hits manufacturing facility

OFS Brands is working to assess damage and develop recovery plans after severe winds tore off sections of the roof and damaged the building.

“Thankfully, it was late in the day, so very few people were in the building and nobody got hurt,” said Ryan Menke, Chief Strategy Officer for OFS Brands. “That is the most important thing.”

According to first responders, only one employee was in the human resource office at the time of the incident. The employee sought shelter in a bathroom as the wind hit the building.

Menke commended the response to the incident. “We’re most appreciative of all the first responders, the fire department, and the police department. Everybody was on site immediately after to make the building safe, turn off the utilities and then start the cleanup process,” he said.

Menke noted that the company’s immediate focus is on securing the building and cleaning up debris before conducting a thorough assessment of structural damage.

The damaged building housed casegood manufacturing for the company, which included items like occasional tables. According to Menke, a long-time employee told him this was the third time the building had experienced wind damage in the past 45 years.

Multiple sections of the roof were affected, including areas above a production line, a finishing room, and a raw material warehouse. Some portions of the roof were removed entirely, while others were lifted and then settled back into place.

OFS has assembled teams to work on various aspects of the recovery, including cleanup crews for both the interior and exterior of the building. They began work immediately after the storm passed through Thursday evening. Menke said structural engineers will be brought in to assess the building once the cleanup is completed, but they were looking at it being next week before they had a full assessment of the building.

Menke said the company has dealt with natural disasters and has developed plans to continue its operations. Adding to the recovery, the company was expanding other areas of its manufacturing to accommodate production activities, which, according to Menke, allows them to move operations around while the damage is assessed and addressed.

“One of the things of having a campus-style operations format is that allows us redundancy,” Menke explained, adding that they can draw upon their experience from the tornado that struck the company’s Kentucky facility in 2001.

“This is unfortunately not the first time we’ve had to deal with severe wind damage,” he said.

The company is concentrating on getting things back up and running quickly.

As the storm rolled into the area Thursday afternoon, Dubois County Dispatch received its first notification of damages to the plant at about 5:40 p.m.

Police and fire immediately responded and began assessing the damage and potential injuries. According to Huntingburg Assistant Fire Chief Scott Patberg, the one person in the human resource office was uninjured and had exited the building. He also confirmed damages to the building’s roof caused a gas leak that Huntingburg Gas employees quickly responded to and were able to isolate. No fire occurred.

Debris blown onto the nearby railroad tracks was removed by responders and OFS employees.

Huntingburg Police, Huntingburg Volunteer Fire Department, Huntingburg Gas Department, and Dubois County Sheriff’s Office responded to the scene. Huntingburg Mayor Neil Elkins was also on the scene.

Thursday evening, Dubois County Emergency Management Director Tammy Humbert supplied the National Weather Service with images of the building’s damages and the videos shared on social media of the moment the winds hit.

“Just from what I was seeing, I felt like it was straight-line winds,” she said about those images and videos.

The National Weather Service confirmed her suspicions after viewing the videos and images. They reported that the straight-line winds infiltrated the bay doors on the western-facing side of the building and “literally peeled the roof off,” Humbert said. “They were estimating 50 to 70 mile per hour winds at least.”

She explained that the damage would have been much worse if the bay doors had been open, adding they were also blessed that though the damage was extensive, it could have been devastating if it had happened during production hours.

“If that had happened an hour or two earlier, Our emergency medical services could have been overwhelmed with injuries,” she said. “What happened was terrible, but it could have been so much worse.”

She reiterated that though many people are convinced it was a tornado, the National Weather Service has confirmed it was straight-line winds.