On Nov. 13, 2014, Tod Halsey noticed something strange about one part of the roof under the cut shop at Woodgrain Millwork. It was sagging between two beams.
“It was literally bowing,” said Halsey, a forklift driver who worked at the mill for 28 years. “It looked like it was smiling.”
“I told supervisors,” he said. “They came out and looked at it and said it would be all right.”
The sagging roof troubled Halsey, but he said even he would not have guessed what would come.
That night, heavy snow blanketed the Central Oregon town of Prineville. By 6 a.m. Nov. 14, many mill workers couldn’t get out of their driveways in time for work. Later, many would say how lucky they were to be housebound by snow.
Halsey was one who made it in to work. At the start of his shift, he noticed the same section of the roof drooping even more. He said he again alerted a boss.
As Halsey and a supervisor were returning for a second look at the roof, he said, he heard a loud pop over an area where lumber was cut and processed, called the “cut shop.”
A major section of Woodgrain Mill’s roof started to collapse. Woodgrain Millwork has operations across the U.S. and is headquartered in Fruitland, Idaho.
Next he heard a long, metal groan. He looked up and watched as the roof began to tear in two above him.
Halsey saw a momentary flash of gray sky as the roof pulled apart, and then everything around him turned pitch black. He was enveloped in dust. He heard gushing water and shouting.
A section of the roof larger than a football field collapsed about 30 yards in front of him. If the roof had come down 15 seconds later, Halsey said, he would have been underneath.
As it turned out, nobody was hurt when the roof fell that day. But Halsey didn’t know that at the time. He would spend the next hour beaming the lights of his forklift into the darkness, searching for his co-workers.
The Roof Collapse
Workers interviewed for this story paint a picture of an environment at Woodgrain where building maintenance was lax and the roof leaked for years. The former Woodgrain workers described what they saw as a number of unsafe conditions and potential safety hazards at the mill, even before the roof collapsed.
When the former employees talk about the day the roof fell, they tend to say similar things.
“If it happened 10, 15 minutes earlier we might have been going to funerals,” said Henry Helmholtz, who worked at Woodgrain 32 years.
“I’m really surprised that somebody wasn’t killed,” said Mary Sanislo, who worked in the cut shop.
On most days, about 16 people worked in the cut shop area. A key piece of equipment was frozen when the workers who did make it in that day arrived at the start of the shift, so cut shop workers were in a different part of the mill as the machine thawed.
Continue reading this story at Oregon Public Broadcasting.