(The Minneapolis Star Tribune posted the following story by Chuck Haga on is website on October 19.)
PERHAM, MINN. — It didn’t sound like a tornado, the runaway train car that wrecked the chocolate factory. But it caused a great sucking wind that swept through the production line where Sandy Erickson was working chocolate and caramel into Christmas treats.
“The suction took my hair net right off,” she said.
Before an empty 61-foot lumber car sliced into the back of Nelson’s Confectionary on Perham’s Main Street about two weeks ago, Erickson was the candy company’s chief chocolatier.
Last week she led a cleanup crew of eight candymakers chipping, scraping and scrubbing machinery, hoping to get the line back into production in time to salvage part of what would have been the little company’s first profitable year.
“We decided we wanted to clean it up ourselves because we’ll do it faster than anyone else,” said Angie Carlson, another candywoman turned custodian. “We want to get back to work. This is our job.”
This is a semisweet story, and a little nutty: the chocolate factory that got Willy Wonka’ed.
It could have been much darker.
Just after 7 a.m. on Oct. 6, a wheel broke on the empty lumber car, the 23rd car in a 53-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway train moving through town at 54 miles per hour on its way from Dilworth, Minn., to the Twin Cities.
The car became detached and jumped the tracks, staying upright and running parallel to the train until it veered into the rear of the factory, crushing walls, beams, 30,000 candy tins, specialized equipment, palettes loaded with sugar and syrup — and 7,000 pounds of finished chocolates destined for Christmas displays at Marshall Field’s, Borders Bookstores, Caribou Coffee and other retailers.
The good news: 30 people were working in the confectionary at the time, but nobody was in the back of the building when the train car hit. The morning before, seven people had been working a packing line in back. Another packing line was scheduled for the next morning. And at any moment that morning, someone could have been back there checking inventory or retrieving a mold.
The car narrowly missed a large propane tank just west of the building. And it was a lumber car, nearly 30 tons of battering power, but empty. Two cars behind was a fully loaded diesel car, said August Pietz, a track inspector who was monitoring the wreckage site this week.
“It’s the fourth derailment in Perham since 1992,” Pietz said. “It’s not the people [operating the trains]. It’s all been mechanical.
“It’s like it’s jinxed, this area.”
Kim Kalan, who with brother-in-law Mark Kalan owns the factory, is feeling a little jinxed. The company did $1.2 million in sales last year and expected to top $1.5 million this year, but the lost inventory and interrupted production will cost at least $500,000, maybe as much as $750,000.
“We do about 80 percent of our business in the last quarter, mostly through large orders to private-label accounts like Marshall Field’s,” Kim Kalan said.
“We were just turning the corner where it felt like it was becoming a real company,” she said, standing amid the crushed tins, shredded insulation and mangled sheet metal of the plant. “We were getting ready to have profit sharing. We were going to make it.
“And then a train hit us.”
Sympathy sought
Kalan and her brother-in-law both mortgaged their Twin Cities homes in 2001 to buy Maud Borup, a St. Paul candy company, and retail outlets at Calhoun Square and Gaviidae Common in Minneapolis and on Grand Avenue in St. Paul.
The candymaking equipment at Maud Borup was old, some of it dating to the company’s start in 1907, so the Kalans bought the Perham confectionary and moved production into the downtown building, a former farm supply store, gas station and coat factory before Kenny Nelson started making licorice and chocolates there in the 1980s.
The Twin Cities retail stores “will run out of inventory in the next week or so,” Kim Kalan said. “They’ll shut down then for as long as we have to until we can get the plant up and running again.”
She hopes to do that by early November. She’s also hoping for a boost from “sympathy sweet tooths,” retail customers and corporations that might buy Christmas chocolates for their employees, so she can get all her people back to work soon.
“Four hours after the crash, I met with our employees at Kelly’s,” a tavern three blocks away, Kalan said. “They looked at me and said, ‘We live paycheck to paycheck, most of us. What are we going to do?’ ”
She told them that a Burlington Northern claims official had visited the accident site and told her not to worry, that the railroad would help cover workers’ salaries until the plant could reopen.
But later, she said, she had to tell them that the railroad was backing off that offer and that they would have to apply for unemployment.
“The railroad said it’s not their problem,” she said. “In so many words, they told me I should have been smarter than to lease a building on the railroad tracks.”
The Kalans have insurance on the building, but they aren’t sure how much of the damage, lost inventory and lost production that will cover. They intend to submit a claim for the difference to the railroad.
BN isn’t talking
The Burlington Northern claims adjuster who talked with Kim Kalan was away from his Fargo, N.D., office last week and unavailable for comment, and Steve Forsberg, a spokesman at the company headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., said he couldn’t comment on damage claims or compensation for lost wages.
The runaway car also hit 30 automobiles parked near the plant.
Shortly after the crash that suspended her employment, candymaker Jennifer Estlick bought 14 scratch-off lottery tickets at Kelly’s, one for each of the 14 workers who had adjourned to the tavern to contemplate their future.
“One of the tickets was a $150 winner,” Estlick said. “And that was our bar tab for the day.”