Parts of meat plant seriously damaged in blaze

Parts of the Alliance Group's Pukeuri meatworks are seriously damaged after a major fire at the North Otago plant yesterday.

Alliance Group production manager John Brader said this morning an initial assessment early today showed serious damage to two of the four boning rooms, with the other two mainly affected by smoke and water damage.

Other parts of the plant appeared unaffected by the huge blaze that raged from 9.30am yesterday until late into last night.

"We're not sure where it started yet," Mr Brader said. "The experts are there at the moment carrying out assessments."

Alliance engineering staff were on site to gauge what repairs were required to get production underway again.

The fire is believed to have started in one of the boning rooms and the Fire Service said difficult access and intense heat made the fire hard to fight.

It struck at a busy time for the Pukeuri plant, which has been processing about 10,500 sheep and lambs a day -- about 90 per cent of capacity. Stock are being redirected to other Alliance plants in the South Island.

"We will have a better idea tomorrow what it means in terms of the plant being able to get going again," Mr Brader said.

"At this stage it's much too early to make a determination on that."

While parts of the plant appeared unaffected by the fire, Mr Brader said it was a case of some departments being dependent on others.

"We're still assessing it."

Mr Brader said some areas of the plant -- such as the rendering and freezing departments -- were expected to be operating today.

Pukeuri, just north of Oamaru, is North Otago's largest employer, with more than 900 employees on the payroll.

Meat Workers Union national secretary Dave Eastlake said today the union was adopting a wait-and-see stance on when the plant was likely to reopen fully.

Worst affected staff would be covered by "minimum payments" this week if the company was unable to resume operations in the next few days, he said.

"Long term, I'm not too sure," Mr Eastlake said. "Some of the reports coming out of there today aren't too good."

He said he understood two of the boning rooms had been "totally destroyed", but that should not affect killing operations.

"I've also heard the slaughter board is in pretty reasonable shape, but ... some of those works are a bit of a rabbit warren and I dare say they'll have to assess what actually works and what doesn't.

"Obviously the company will be wanting to get it up and running again as fast as they can, but it depends how badly damaged it is."

Mr Eastlake said he expected Alliance would redeploy staff from Pukeuri to other works if extra workers were required to handle the unexpected influx of stock.

"Obviously, if they can't get going immediately, we've no problem with them redeploying staff."

- NZPA