Production at Volkswagen’s Kaluga plant has resumed today (5 August) following a shut down caused by catastrophic fires raging across Russia.
Western Russia and even Siberia have endured some of the highest temperatures on record this summer, provoking widespread peat and forest fires and forcing Volkswagen to halt output in Kaluga yesterday for 18 hours as employees were faced with potential breathing difficulties.
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“It is not there is a danger of fire at Kaluga, but it is a question of dust and breathing,” a VW spokesman in Germany told just-auto. ” It depends on the wind direction and yesterday, unfortunately, it was coming from the south east.
“We did not want to close our factory, but we didn’t want to endanger our employees. Management decided to stop production yesterday. We can’t be sure of the weather conditions in the next few days when we are not able to control and get the fire down.”
The Volkswagen spokesman was unable to confirm what distance the fires were from the plant, which is around 170km south west of Moscow, although the factory is now running normally.
Kaluga, which employs around 3,000 staff, produces the Volkswagen Tiguan and Polo models as well as the Skoda Octavia and Fabia vehicles.
The spokesman was unable to elaborate on what cost the shutdown had entailed for Volkswagen.
