W.C. Wood factory in Ottawa shuts doors

OTTAWA — Employees at one of Putnam County’s largest employers finally heard an answer Monday. It just wasn’t the answer they wanted.

W.C. Wood Corp., which owned a freezer factory in Ottawa, announced it couldn’t find a buyer in time to avoid liquidating the entire company. A Canadian court placed the company in receivership, leaving the Ottawa plant’s remaining 150 employees without a job.

“I think a lot of people were at the point they were just ready for the end to be here,” said Mark Siefker, 52, a senior product engineer who spent 18 years at the Ottawa plant. “We were ready for our answer: We’d be bought and ready to go again. Nobody thought the end is here, and it is the end.”

The mood swung quickly at the company’s top level too, said W.C. Wood President Joseph Angi. The company sent a memo to employees two weeks ago suggesting brighter days were ahead.

The company had been looking for a buyer since filing a Companies Creditors Arrangement Act in Canada in May. It received Chapter 15 protection in the United States in June. After marketing the company aggressively to more than 100 private equity firms, it received just one offer, from a company called One Rock, Angi said.

“Ultimately, One Rock was not able to solve all the conditions for its purchase agreement,” Angi said. “The purchase agreement expired on Friday. The banks lost patience, and we ran out of time.”

In the liquidation process, the company must sell its assets, including finished products, raw materials, equipment and the plants themselves, to raise the money to pay back creditors.

W.C. Wood, which operated for nearly 80 years, began with a manufacturing plant in Guelph, Ontario. It opened the Ottawa plant in 1990 and another in Torreon, Mexico, in 2004. All its plants terminated their employees Monday and face liquidation. At its peak, the company had 1,100 employees in North America.

The North American Free Trade Agreement “didn’t hurt this situation at all,” Angi said.

The Ottawa factory employed 425 workers just last fall, when it was the largest employer in Putnam County. Its staffing dipped to 320 people in May and dwindled since then, down to an estimated 150 people.

Jeff Loehrke, community development director for Ottawa, said he received a notice the company went into receivership. He declined to comment on what this would mean to the village.

Many employees worked just three days since October, said Randy Schroeder, 36, who spent 17½ years at W.C. Wood, wrapping up his tenure in a lead hand position.

“This is going to be tough, especially right now,” Schroeder said. “You have to feel sorry for many of us. There are a lot of people in their 40s or 50s. To try to find a job now, the way the economy is now, it is not a good situation.”

The company won’t be able to pay any severance packages, Angi said.

“They’ve asked a few employees at the U.S. and Canadian plants to stay for a short period of time to assist with the liquidation process,” Angi said.

Siefker blamed the company’s downfall on its sale to Red Diamond Capital in December 2007.

“We had a good work force out there, and we made a good product,” he said. “Something changed with the new owners when they bought it from the Wood family a year and a half ago.”

Angi, who joined the company in January 2008, said the company faced the same problems other companies did during the recent recession.

“I think it’s general economics since the economic collapse in the fall of 2008,” Angi said. “It’s not specific to appliances or freezers. Those are the things we had to cope with. We’d done our best to try to get through this situation, but we’ve not been able to do it.”

Reporter Nancy Kline contributed to this story.