September 25, 2017
Swickers’ road to recovery after last year’s devastating fire is well on track, but the company has not forsaken its previous expansion plans, either.
General Manager Linchon Hawks briefed KCCI members at a breakfast meeting last week on Swickers’ current position and what was in the pipeline.
The November 2016 fire destroyed the boning room, chillers and export distribution centre.
Boning room workers were temporarily relocated to Ipswich while a temporary boning room was built, attached to another building on site in Kingaroy.
Work on the permanent, new boning room building – which has been built on the same footprint as the old one – is now well-advanced – in fact, there is a little piece of the new building already in use.
The fire required a lot of stop-gap measures to be initiated quickly to keep the plant operating.
Mr Hawks said 42 refrigerated trucks were brought on site to fill in for the destroyed chillers.
A new freezer and chiller building was also constructed in parallel to the temporary boning room building and is now in full use.
Four chillers came back online on August 31, and another two a fortnight ago.
Concrete hardstands built for the refrigerated trucks necessitated an enlargement of the stormwater management pond to catch run-off, an Environmental Protection Agency requirement.
A swampy area was drained and the pond enlarged so it can now hold up to 65ML of stormwater.
The fire also made a temporary entrance off Clark and Swendson Road necessary to allow tradespeople and equipment to access the plant.
This is not the second gate the company had originally planned, and for which roadworks were completed.
Mr Hawks said the second gate would still go ahead when construction work was finished. When it opens, the plan is for all pig trucks to enter via Clark and Swendson Road while cars will enter via Kingaroy-Barkers Creek Road. The temporary entrance will then be closed.
Still to be built is a tunnel that will link the new boning room with the new freezer building. This may require some adjustments to the old entrance off Kingaroy-Barkers Creek Road.
Mr Hawks said Swickers’ original plans to build a new multi-million dollar, state-of-the-art greenfield slaughter room were still on the agenda.
This could lift potential kill capacity from the current 18,500-19,000 pigs a week to a possible 40,000 a week.
“We have to meet the needs and the market demands,” Mr Hawks said.
“We are looking forward to growth.”
Although this expansion could mean close to 100 extra jobs, Mr Hawks said 60 of those people had already been employed.
He said that before the fire, Swickers employed about 525 workers; now that was 715 because of double shifts at the plant.
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