Dairy plays catch-up over the weekend after machinery fault
MILK supplies were rationed over the weekend after a breakdown at the Guernsey Dairy.
Staff worked through the night and over the weekend to repair an essential piece of equipment that had failed, bringing milk processing to a halt on Friday morning.
Repairs were carried out overnight on Friday, however by then, the cold store reserves had been completely exhausted.
Milk production was able to resume at 3am on Saturday, in the meantime, the dairy was reliant on just its cold store reserves of around 20,000 litres to meet orders over the weekend, until processing could be resumed.
All milk destined for doorstep deliveries on Saturday was collected from the dairy early on Saturday morning and weekend orders from distributors to local retail outlets were restricted and could only be fulfilled to around 50% of the normal quantities from remaining stock.
Guernsey Dairy continued processing on Saturday to make up the shortfall.
However as with all local milk, the finished product had to undergo rigorous testing over a 24-hour period before being released for sale.
By early Sunday morning, the milk met regulatory standards and was released for sale following which all outstanding order quantities were met in full.
As a precautionary measure, a specialist engineer arrived in the island on Saturday at short notice to commission the repairs dairy engineers had carried out, preventing supplies running out entirely over the weekend and avoiding thousands of litres of raw milk having to be disposed of.
Dairy staff were then back at work again on Sunday to process milk to replenish the cold store reserves.
General manager of Guernsey Dairy Andrew Tabel said: 'All of our equipment undergoes regular preventative maintenance and servicing, to minimise the chance of incidents like this.
'However, when you are continually running production machinery, inevitably you are going to have faults occur at some time, usually with no warning.
'All you can hope is that when things do go wrong, it is nothing too major and you have the spares and technical support to minimise the impact on the island’s fresh milk supply.'
This breakdown did, unfortunately, have a major impact, made even more difficult given the current travel restrictions to bring assistance over and heading into the weekend.
Due to cold storage limitations, the Dairy was able to maintain supplies from its contingency stock, but only until Saturday morning.
'Had our engineering team not been able to administer a satisfactory repair, we were looking at the possibility of being incapacitated until today [Tuesday 2 June], at the earliest,' Mr Tabel said.
'And given that we have limited storage and have to comply with dairy food regulations, if we are unable to process milk within a certain timeframe, we have to start thinking about managing its safe disposal.
'Thanks to the resourcefulness and dedication of our staff, who pulled out all the stops, we managed to prevent the island from running out of fresh, locally produced, liquid milk.'
