Log Building Manufacturer Rebuilds From Fire

When Rocky Mountain Log Homes, one of the largest manufacturers of log buildings in North America, needed to rebuild its manufacturing facility after a fire destroyed a 12,400 square foot wood and steel structure within a few hours, they turned to Cover-All Building Systems.

Since 1974, Rocky Mountain Log Homes has helped thousands of new homeowners and entrepreneurs create their dreams. Located one hour outside of Missoula, MN and employing nearly 100 people, the Rocky Mountain manufacturing plant is the worlds only log home facility utilizing robotics in manufacturing. Jim Schueler, owner and president of Rocky Mountain Log Homes, started the company to build secondary log homes and over the years has expanded into the commercial building market, supplying log buildings to restaurants, golf courses, churches, libraries, motels, and ski resorts.

The recent fire in the plant proved to be a pre-cautionary learning lesson for the company. "The biggest lesson we learned was not to consolidate all of our equipment in one building," says Scott Hagen, Rocky Mountain plant manager. "An electrical fault started the fire in the attic, so by the time we discovered the fire it was out of control. All of the equipment was destroyed; the total loss was in the range of one million dollars."

A long delay would greatly impact the company's bottom line. "Everyday is money. We needed a building quickly to get our manufacturing plant back into production," says Hagen. Over the span of four days, the Rocky Mountain Log Home executive team researched and made the decision to purchase a steel framed fabric covered building manufactured by Cover-All Building Systems from Bill and Michelle Abney of Cover-All Buildings of Montana. "The buildings are structurally sound and Cover-All Montana was able to deliver a building within a tight timeline," says Hagen

Another reason Rocky Mountain Log Homes chose Cover-All was for fire safety reasons. "A lot of our manufacturing equipment was destroyed by large falling objects as the building caved in. We didn't want a building that was going to contribute to a fire like our old manufacturing facility did," says Hagen. The steel walls contained the fire, it became like a ''blast furnace'' inside. The heat literally bent and melted one inch thick steel. The only way to get at the fire was to pull away the outside steel on the sides of the building. The wood trusses of the roof contributed to the blaze and eventually caved in and crushed most of the equipment inside."

'What we discovered about the Cover-All buildings is that the fire retardant (polyethylene) fabric doesn''t catch on fire; it simply melts away from the flame and extinguishes itself. If a fire should break out in the Cover-All buildings, it will be easier to control and far less equipment damage should occur by falling debris," says Hagen.

The large clear span space, the natural light and the ability to deliver and erect a building in a tight timeline made perfect business sense to the Rocky Mountain executive team. Within the span of three weeks a Cover-All® TITAN® building and two Cover-All Icon™ Utility buildings were ordered and delivered to the site. Installation of the new 80' wide x 160' long manufacturing facility took only 4 days. The two Icon™ Utility buildings are 26' wide x 32' long and 26' wide x 60' long and house rounding machine equipment. All three buildings were installed on newly poured cement pads with in-floor radiant heating.

In the span of five weeks since the fire, Rocky Mountain Log Homes was back in production. "The change in our work environment is completely different, the natural light is a huge bonus," says Hagen. "In our old manufacturing facility, we had to use different forms of artificial light to see the grade of the logs, it was always difficult to judge if what we were seeing was accurate. In the Cover-All® buildings, we have all this natural light, grading logs is no longer guess work."