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Palm Beach County Sugar Producers Weigh Damage to Crucial La. Refinery

Posted on: Friday, 16 September 2005, 09:00 CDT

Sep. 16--The floodwaters that followed Hurricane Katrina have drained from a Louisiana sugar refinery owned by two Palm Beach County firms, and an engineer is at the plant assessing the damage.

For now, the focus for the Domino Sugar refinery in Chalmette, La., will be on repair.

"As soon as they can turn the switch on, they will," said Gaston Cantens, spokesman for West Palm Beach-based Florida Crystals Corp. "We have had help from the USDA and FEMA helping us to try to get ourselves back on line."

All but three of the refinery's 326 workers have been heard from, but those three workers are thought to be fine, said Barbara Miedema, spokeswoman for the Belle Glade-based Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida.

The cooperative and Florida Crystals own the Domino refinery, which is in St. Bernard Parish, one of the hardest-hit areas of Louisiana.

It's not known yet when the plant, which is crucial to the sugar industry and to Louisiana's economy, will be up and running, or the extent of the damage to equipment, Cantens said. Miedema said the refinery, one of two in Louisiana and the state's biggest refinery, produced 900,000 tons of refined sugar last season, or 6.2 million pounds a day.

Like much of the area around the plant, the serious damage came from Katrina's floodwaters rather than its wind, Miedema said. Approximately 18 employees and 22 of their family members were at the plant during and after the hurricane.

Water inside the plant rose as high as 13 feet, and people had to be rescued by boat.

"Historically the Chalmette refinery had been a safe place for people to weather out storms," Miedema said.

Ben Legendre, sugar cane specialist at the Louisiana State University Research Station in St. Gabriel, said the state's 13 sugar mills are scheduled to start their season Monday. The Colonial Sugar refinery in Gramercy, La., can't handle all the sugar cane the state's 700 or so growers produce.

If the Domino refinery doesn't begin operating soon, raw sugar from the mills will have to be stored or shipped elsewhere to be refined, Legendre said, which could increase transportation costs.

Katrina's damage to Louisiana's cane crop is still being assessed, Legendre said. Sugar cane is the state's leading row crop and last season was valued at $509 million.

Louisiana produced 1.2 million tons of sugar from 11.5 million tons of cane last season, the smallest crop since 1996.

"We feel Katrina did cause significant losses to Louisiana's sugar cane industry and will cause increases in costs on the harvesting side and the processing side," Legendre said. "We won't have the same recovery per ton of sugar, and it will cost more per pound to produce."

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Source: The Palm Beach Post

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