Last year was a really bad year for factory fires, according to a new report.
Some 1,946 factory fire alerts were issued in 2021 by Resilinc, which describes itself as “the world’s leading supply chain risk monitoring and mapping solution.”
Supply chain disruptions were up 88 percent year-over-year, the group says, and 90 percent of them were human-caused. Factory fires, meanwhile, were up 129 percent year-over-year, and this includes factory fires overseas.
“The uptick is due mostly to gaps in regulatory and process execution as well as a shortage of skilled labor in warehouses,” a press release from the company claims.
In 2022 so far, there have been dozens of food processing facility fires that all cropped up right around the same time. Now we know that the fires are occurring elsewhere in the world, too.
These fires combined with other factors are responsible for a whopping 452 percent increase, year-over-year, in disruptions due to supply shortages, which include everything from semiconductor chips to plastics, paper and raw materials.
“This type of disruption ranked 6th in terms of most reported events (behind Leadership Transition),” Resilinc says.