A tornado heavily damaged a Pfizer pharmaceutical plant in North Carolina on Wednesday night. Luckily, the company said there were no serious injuries.
The Associated Press reported that the plant near Rocky Mount had parts of the roofs ripped off where large amounts of medications are stored.
“I’ve got reports of 50,000 pallets of medicine that are strewn across the facility and damaged through the rain and wind,” Nash County Sheriff Keith Stone said.
According to Pfizer’s website, the location made anesthesia and other drugs, including 25% of all sterile injectable medications used in hospitals across the country.
Reuters reported that the facility is one of the largest sterile injectable production locations in the world. It had 1.4 million square feet of manufacturing areas on 250 acres, producing more than 400 million items each year, according to Pfizer.
It also makes anti-infectives, neuromuscular blockers, vials and syringes.
Some predict that there will be long-term shortages of the medications until Pfizer can move production to another plant or rebuild the North Carolina facility, the AP reported.
“We are assessing the situation to determine the impact on production. Our thoughts are with our colleagues, our patients, and the community as we rebuild from this weather incident,” Pfizer said in a statement to CNN.
The plant had more than 4,500 employees, Reuters reported.
CNN and the National Weather Service said the tornado that passed through Nash County was an EF-3 with peak winds of 150 mph. It was on the ground for 16.5 miles for about 30 minutes.
Overall, 13 people in the county were hurt in the storm, all with minor injuries, WTVD reported. Emergency services said at least 89 buildings were damaged, including a daycare near the Pfizer plant where children were inside when the tornado passed over them. No one was hurt and the daycare’s owner has already started cleaning up the debris.
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