JACKSONVILLE (KYTX) - We're working to find out when a Jacksonville cardboard manufacturing plant will re-open after fire broke out Wednesday afternoon.
"I thought, oh no my building can't be burning down."
Herise Nathaniel worked the assembly line at Western Pulp Products for 15 years before retiring. She knows what can go wrong inside.
"you pack corner pads. They come out in a belt and they dry it out in the oven, and you pack them when they get to the end of the line. And, they're very hot." she says.
Jacksonville Fire Chief Paul White says one of the workers accidentally packed a cardboard corner pad that was still smoldering from the oven, and it caught fire.
"They had two people trying to fight the fire and they had to back out because the smoke was too thick. They couldn't stay in there."
White says the smoke is what made battling the fire and getting the products out so difficult.
"It was so smoky in the building." he says. "The building is probably 16,000 square feet or something. You couldn't see how to move the pallets."
White says most of the damage is to the products inside, not the building.
"The only damage to the building as far as I know, is on the ceiling where we're knocking some skylights out, trying to ventilate."
"We had some fire here," says Nathaniel, "but nothing like this when I was working here."
Firefighters say luckily no one got hurt and none of the workers got trapped inside with the thick smoke.
