After a devastating fire on Oct. 23, 2022, the team at Wilbur-Ellis rallied around its Moses Lake, Washington colleagues and customers.
“It was like watching my home away from home burn—it was heartbreaking,” says Anita Paulsson, distribution manager at the facility. “But we were able to not miss a beat. We kept going.”
The 19,000-ton fertilizer warehouse was a total loss.
The six-person on-site team was then surrounded by its larger geographic team to continue to serve farmer customers despite the fire.
“We found out how much of Wilbur-Ellis is about people and not buildings,” Paulsson says. “Resilience was the key word for us in 2023.”
For sixteen months—across two growing seasons for the area’s row crops, specialty crops and orchards–the larger team kept operations going in all of the ways they could and were able to patchwork together uninterrupted services. The team brought in rail cars and transloaded from rail to truck over 15,000 tons. The blending needs were supported by two area branches in Pasco and Quincy.
In March 2024 a brand-new structure was complete and replaced the company’s 19,000-ton facility with a new warehouse of the same storage capacity.
“With the same footprint we were able to gain increased efficiency and speed in blending with a larger weigh hopper for micronutrients and a larger mixer,” Paulsson says.
She credits key vendors in Stueve Construction, Easy Automation, and Sackett-Waconia in rebuilding the site.
“It was an army of partners,” she says. “And the entire project highlighted how we came together.”
