I believe the food supply issues are critical, I'm personally very concerned. but I don't know what number to ascribe to the background level of fire occurrence within the food supply system in order to tell if this is an increase, or just the normal rate that we are now paying attention to as we are concerned about the food supply chain.
Fire is pretty common in manufacturing. I've worked in several bakeries (and other food products) and they've all had fires. It's one of the reasons there's a normal monthly clean cycle.
It doesn't take much for a fire to get out of control when you consider all the old dust on top of pipes, 60k gallons of oil, and all of the baked ingredients going through. Picture 5 ovens the length of a football field running at 350-500f to make crackers. Conveyor stops in the oven and oven catches fire. Safeties get bypassed over the years and the oven is destroyed.... I saw that one happen.
Given the age of most of these buildings and the lack of capital spending to bring them up to date it's not surprising. There's a cereal that's superheated to 500f on top of a process involving hydraulic fluid (Flashpoint 300f). If you don't have enough maintenance people to maintain the equipment then a small leak turns into a fire.
There's a lot of that happening right now. Lack of maintenance. Lack of oversight. Lack of people. Lack of real safety. Lack of sanitation. I know a facility that dumped 15k gallons of acid on the ground because a valve was left open and nobody noticed until after the truck left. Or a company that dumped maybe 100k gallons of caustic in the sewer because a valve failed and nobody knew how to fix it, so it had to finish emptying the tank before they could look at it.
That's why I'm not really surprised by all of the fires in food manufacturing. There's probably a fire at several right now. I've been at my current company a few months and there's been 3 or 4 so far.
Yeah it's really a chickens coming home to roost thing. I know one plant that had never taken care of the roof because the roof doesn't make money. It's a 60 year old building. The FDA walked in, saw the 100+ leak diverters, and told them they have 30 days to fix them all or the entire company is getting shut down until they do. The company magically found money to fix every roof.
Manufacturing runs on metrics. Lot of places it doesn't matter if the food gets out the door, just that the OEE looks good. You can literally be running the product directly into a dumpster as long as the bag machine hits 75% this month and you can fudge it up to 80% next month.
If you ever want to see food waste get a tour of a food plant. It is pretty disgusting.
One messed up one was a valve that was wired backwards on a cleaning system. Anytime they used a certain tank it added a mild acid from the cleaning cycle to the product. When I told the supervisor his response was "fix the wiring and don't say anything. We don't want a recall." I left there shortly after that and won't use their product.
Oh yeah, food grade hydraulic oil was used in a process filling cans. The company decided it was too expensive so they switched to non-food grade. Anytime they had any type of audit maintenance had to hide the barrels of hydraulic oil.
I knew it was bad, but not to this extension. Mind if I share these two commentaries from you in some future post ?
Also I didn't take into account here (no commentary or analysis from me) but on previous posts, and in my Twitter I did say the pandemic would take a massive toll on people, and it would intensify these type of accidents, failures, but at this point this is going beyond the literal mathematical odds. Plus other things.
Sure, that's cool. And I wasn't trying to step on your toes. I really think people are the biggest thing followed by spare parts.
PLC subreddit shoes great examples of where we're headed. Link to a pic below. The people that could fix that panel quit during covid. But the companies also have never spent the money to fix them. One place I worked had at least 500 panels that look exactly like that.
The PLC in this panel is at least 20 years old. I've seen 40 year old ones running some complex products. Safety systems are a relatively new thing in that the new ones can't easily be bypassed. One on a panel like that requires a few keystrokes. So over the years something stops working correctly it gets bypassed and "we'll fix it later" kicks in.
Corporate America has invested so little in maintaining their equipment or hiring and retaining their people that it's a time bomb. One way to see and plot it would be age of building vs fire. It should be possible and I think we'd see a high concentration on the old building side. If I have time today I'll try that.
One other note on it when it comes to spare parts. You talked about the shortages because of shipping.
The reason that's going to hit hard is also corporate policies.
There's been a push for years to reduce spare parts and only keep a few critical spares. Parts are assets and they have to pay taxes on them. So corporate has been making plants throw out anything they can't justify as critical.
Second is not upgrading equipment. A lot of equipment is 10-30 years old. They are allowed to depreciate them every year on taxes. Eventually they have 0 value and don't cost them anything in taxes. But if they upgrade a 30 year old machine and put 500k into it then that machine now has to go through the depreciation process again.
The third is if they replace a machine, even if they can use all of the parts off of it, they can't. They've reported that machine as junk and 0 value. If they take all the parts off of it then it now has value again. So even if they need something off of it they technically need to get it in a dumpster and offsite as quick as possible.
I've said it here and other places. Lack of people and parts means they're going to have to consolidate. I could see companies finding the one or two good plants and redirecting all of their people and parts there. Especially as the recession gets worse and supply chain continues to collapse.
There is no stepping on my toes here, I will gladly be corrected anywhere. I discussed this with a friend, and I am inclined to agree with you, perhaps I am overestimating some of my own biases (probably). Since I never worked in industry, I am prone to observer effect. Said friend is an electrical engineer, and have told me the same many times.
Glue, silver tape, and paracord maintain everything togeher.
Spare parts is hard for me to track down directly, since no company will say "we are facing difficult production times because we lack basic parts".
At one level this is incredibly shocking. At another level it is expected; every other institution is a basket case of twisted incentive structures which corrupt everything. are you a manufacturing engineer or in QA?
My working hypothesis is that we have reached a tipping point, beyond which increasing complexity cannot be sustained, while attempts at greater controls only exacerbate the chaos. Fossil energy allowed us to push that complexity far beyond anything in known history. The chaos resulting will be extensive, and seems to be accelerating. There is something indeed irreducible about the process, but signals can be teased out, though extrapolating motive from those signals is mere conjecture. The fog of global chaos is far greater than the fog of any war. What looks like motive may just be everybody seeking of advantage, some of those a lot more socially powerful than we are.
We can bet, if we are discussing it, so are those who control a lot more resources than we do. When the chaos settles, the people will be easily controlled.
In a early post I shared this exact perspective, and I stand by it too, I agree with you, but given the work I used to do, plus everything else, I believe one can accelerate the fall by orders of magnitude if the person/group know where to press the buttons, and a decent time frame (couple years).
I hear the WEF gamed a global virus shut down of the internet. But then they need it for their digital currency, and that would make most people less likely to accept it, when you need the internet to use it. But then they might be mad enough to try.
You take the whole internet off, and say given the extension of the attack, now you need a fully centralized, digital ID one, on the supervision of one "public entity with private partnership", insert newspeak from WEF here.
I'm a retired firefighter and when there's a big warehouse fire we all hear about it. I can say that after 20 years on the job I didn't hear of this number of warehouse fires happening within this kind of a timeframe. Although I have seen some analyses that indicate the number of food warehouse fires in the past two years has followed the norm. I'm not sure at this point but in my experience this is not a normal year.
Curious and potentially worrisome. On the control side, if you were to look back over the last 5 to 10 years, would it show that the current level of these events is way out of whack?
Trend wise, not so much, mathematically wise, and specially speed, they are, at the end of this year I bet it there will be a significant divergence from other years.
No, I don't think so. In fact, the lack of a violent reaction to mandates in the workplace is striking. Feeds into a suspicion that workplace violence in the USA might be encouraged by Deep State actors from time to time.
Plus dozens of Wildfires in the Southwest US with causes under investigation. Explanation for some fires was discussed after your previous post, but I expect most are intentional. Antifa might factor in somewhere. or State sponsored actors, foreign or domestic.
I think I saw there are 36000 food processing plants in US. 19 burned down this year or such?is it not more likely to be understaffed and unfit for role tired workers making mistakes?recently BA2 has been rampant forcing many staff to miss weeks of work.im not a naysayer.im looking for the patterns and truth too. Any thoughts?
From a purely analytical stand point, it would take a lot of effort, it is not the number, even though it is significant on itself, that makes me scratch my head, but also the companies. 100 can burn, and have minimal effect. 1 burns, and the world suffers a shortage (per the HCQ one, the substrate used in graphic cards, among others).
Some of these failures have critical, massive global impact.
I warned about both BA. 1, and BA. 2 wiping out workforce, because of mandates and everything else in... January I think... maybe I do post too much...
I believe the food supply issues are critical, I'm personally very concerned. but I don't know what number to ascribe to the background level of fire occurrence within the food supply system in order to tell if this is an increase, or just the normal rate that we are now paying attention to as we are concerned about the food supply chain.
Fire is pretty common in manufacturing. I've worked in several bakeries (and other food products) and they've all had fires. It's one of the reasons there's a normal monthly clean cycle.
It doesn't take much for a fire to get out of control when you consider all the old dust on top of pipes, 60k gallons of oil, and all of the baked ingredients going through. Picture 5 ovens the length of a football field running at 350-500f to make crackers. Conveyor stops in the oven and oven catches fire. Safeties get bypassed over the years and the oven is destroyed.... I saw that one happen.
Given the age of most of these buildings and the lack of capital spending to bring them up to date it's not surprising. There's a cereal that's superheated to 500f on top of a process involving hydraulic fluid (Flashpoint 300f). If you don't have enough maintenance people to maintain the equipment then a small leak turns into a fire.
There's a lot of that happening right now. Lack of maintenance. Lack of oversight. Lack of people. Lack of real safety. Lack of sanitation. I know a facility that dumped 15k gallons of acid on the ground because a valve was left open and nobody noticed until after the truck left. Or a company that dumped maybe 100k gallons of caustic in the sewer because a valve failed and nobody knew how to fix it, so it had to finish emptying the tank before they could look at it.
That's why I'm not really surprised by all of the fires in food manufacturing. There's probably a fire at several right now. I've been at my current company a few months and there's been 3 or 4 so far.
Thank you for the first hand account.
Yeah it's really a chickens coming home to roost thing. I know one plant that had never taken care of the roof because the roof doesn't make money. It's a 60 year old building. The FDA walked in, saw the 100+ leak diverters, and told them they have 30 days to fix them all or the entire company is getting shut down until they do. The company magically found money to fix every roof.
Manufacturing runs on metrics. Lot of places it doesn't matter if the food gets out the door, just that the OEE looks good. You can literally be running the product directly into a dumpster as long as the bag machine hits 75% this month and you can fudge it up to 80% next month.
If you ever want to see food waste get a tour of a food plant. It is pretty disgusting.
One messed up one was a valve that was wired backwards on a cleaning system. Anytime they used a certain tank it added a mild acid from the cleaning cycle to the product. When I told the supervisor his response was "fix the wiring and don't say anything. We don't want a recall." I left there shortly after that and won't use their product.
Oh yeah, food grade hydraulic oil was used in a process filling cans. The company decided it was too expensive so they switched to non-food grade. Anytime they had any type of audit maintenance had to hide the barrels of hydraulic oil.
I knew it was bad, but not to this extension. Mind if I share these two commentaries from you in some future post ?
Also I didn't take into account here (no commentary or analysis from me) but on previous posts, and in my Twitter I did say the pandemic would take a massive toll on people, and it would intensify these type of accidents, failures, but at this point this is going beyond the literal mathematical odds. Plus other things.
Sure, that's cool. And I wasn't trying to step on your toes. I really think people are the biggest thing followed by spare parts.
PLC subreddit shoes great examples of where we're headed. Link to a pic below. The people that could fix that panel quit during covid. But the companies also have never spent the money to fix them. One place I worked had at least 500 panels that look exactly like that.
The PLC in this panel is at least 20 years old. I've seen 40 year old ones running some complex products. Safety systems are a relatively new thing in that the new ones can't easily be bypassed. One on a panel like that requires a few keystrokes. So over the years something stops working correctly it gets bypassed and "we'll fix it later" kicks in.
https://i.redd.it/frw668k9i5v81.jpg
Corporate America has invested so little in maintaining their equipment or hiring and retaining their people that it's a time bomb. One way to see and plot it would be age of building vs fire. It should be possible and I think we'd see a high concentration on the old building side. If I have time today I'll try that.
One other note on it when it comes to spare parts. You talked about the shortages because of shipping.
The reason that's going to hit hard is also corporate policies.
There's been a push for years to reduce spare parts and only keep a few critical spares. Parts are assets and they have to pay taxes on them. So corporate has been making plants throw out anything they can't justify as critical.
Second is not upgrading equipment. A lot of equipment is 10-30 years old. They are allowed to depreciate them every year on taxes. Eventually they have 0 value and don't cost them anything in taxes. But if they upgrade a 30 year old machine and put 500k into it then that machine now has to go through the depreciation process again.
The third is if they replace a machine, even if they can use all of the parts off of it, they can't. They've reported that machine as junk and 0 value. If they take all the parts off of it then it now has value again. So even if they need something off of it they technically need to get it in a dumpster and offsite as quick as possible.
I've said it here and other places. Lack of people and parts means they're going to have to consolidate. I could see companies finding the one or two good plants and redirecting all of their people and parts there. Especially as the recession gets worse and supply chain continues to collapse.
There is no stepping on my toes here, I will gladly be corrected anywhere. I discussed this with a friend, and I am inclined to agree with you, perhaps I am overestimating some of my own biases (probably). Since I never worked in industry, I am prone to observer effect. Said friend is an electrical engineer, and have told me the same many times.
Glue, silver tape, and paracord maintain everything togeher.
Spare parts is hard for me to track down directly, since no company will say "we are facing difficult production times because we lack basic parts".
At one level this is incredibly shocking. At another level it is expected; every other institution is a basket case of twisted incentive structures which corrupt everything. are you a manufacturing engineer or in QA?
Controls Engineer. Basically a glorified electrician that understands plcs and gets pulled in every direction.
Potatohead, I find your posts fascinating.
Interesting that this article shows up:
FBI WARNS OF TARGETED CYBER ATTACKS ON FOOD PLANTS AFTER MYSTERIOUS RASH OF FIRES
https://mixedtimes.com/business/fbi-warns-of-targeted-cyber-attacks-on-food-plants-after-mysterious-rash-of-fires#
I shared that one in my Twitter. That has multiple tones to it.
What's your Twitter handle?
https://twitter.com/ThingsHiddenn
It is fairly different from what you read here though.
My working hypothesis is that we have reached a tipping point, beyond which increasing complexity cannot be sustained, while attempts at greater controls only exacerbate the chaos. Fossil energy allowed us to push that complexity far beyond anything in known history. The chaos resulting will be extensive, and seems to be accelerating. There is something indeed irreducible about the process, but signals can be teased out, though extrapolating motive from those signals is mere conjecture. The fog of global chaos is far greater than the fog of any war. What looks like motive may just be everybody seeking of advantage, some of those a lot more socially powerful than we are.
We can bet, if we are discussing it, so are those who control a lot more resources than we do. When the chaos settles, the people will be easily controlled.
In a early post I shared this exact perspective, and I stand by it too, I agree with you, but given the work I used to do, plus everything else, I believe one can accelerate the fall by orders of magnitude if the person/group know where to press the buttons, and a decent time frame (couple years).
I hear the WEF gamed a global virus shut down of the internet. But then they need it for their digital currency, and that would make most people less likely to accept it, when you need the internet to use it. But then they might be mad enough to try.
You take the whole internet off, and say given the extension of the attack, now you need a fully centralized, digital ID one, on the supervision of one "public entity with private partnership", insert newspeak from WEF here.
I'm a retired firefighter and when there's a big warehouse fire we all hear about it. I can say that after 20 years on the job I didn't hear of this number of warehouse fires happening within this kind of a timeframe. Although I have seen some analyses that indicate the number of food warehouse fires in the past two years has followed the norm. I'm not sure at this point but in my experience this is not a normal year.
Over a dozen food processing plants damaged or destroyed over the last few weeks.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/04/24/increase-in-industrial-accidents-at-food-processing-plants-has-raised-suspicions/
Curious and potentially worrisome. On the control side, if you were to look back over the last 5 to 10 years, would it show that the current level of these events is way out of whack?
Trend wise, not so much, mathematically wise, and specially speed, they are, at the end of this year I bet it there will be a significant divergence from other years.
OK. Will keep watching events unfold on your channel :)
I wonder if these are from vaccine-debilitated people making mistakes, or vaccine-injured people taking revenge for a mandate.
No, I don't think so. In fact, the lack of a violent reaction to mandates in the workplace is striking. Feeds into a suspicion that workplace violence in the USA might be encouraged by Deep State actors from time to time.
More coincidence
Crews tackle 'ferocious' fire at Harlow sausage factory
26/04/2022
=>https://archive.is/wip/x7gS3
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-61227225
Or more nefarious and precise acts of the destruction of our entire society
Plus dozens of Wildfires in the Southwest US with causes under investigation. Explanation for some fires was discussed after your previous post, but I expect most are intentional. Antifa might factor in somewhere. or State sponsored actors, foreign or domestic.
I think I saw there are 36000 food processing plants in US. 19 burned down this year or such?is it not more likely to be understaffed and unfit for role tired workers making mistakes?recently BA2 has been rampant forcing many staff to miss weeks of work.im not a naysayer.im looking for the patterns and truth too. Any thoughts?
From a purely analytical stand point, it would take a lot of effort, it is not the number, even though it is significant on itself, that makes me scratch my head, but also the companies. 100 can burn, and have minimal effect. 1 burns, and the world suffers a shortage (per the HCQ one, the substrate used in graphic cards, among others).
Some of these failures have critical, massive global impact.
I warned about both BA. 1, and BA. 2 wiping out workforce, because of mandates and everything else in... January I think... maybe I do post too much...
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