JACKSON, Tenn. — The afternoon of February 5, 2026, David Oesch was taking out the trash. He was on the left side of his plant – Allied Hose & Belting at 40 N. Conalco Drive – when he saw his purchasing agent, Michelle, outside on the phone with 911.

Smoke was already curling out of the roof. Twenty seconds later, an employee burst out of the roll-up door yelling “fire, fire, fire,” followed by a wall of black smoke.

Within a few hours, the building Oesch had run for 33 years was a total loss.

“Thirty-three years I’ve been here,” Oesch said. “And that’s what happened that day.”

The company inside the facility was a fabricator and light manufacturer serving West Tennessee, Western Kentucky, parts of Missouri, Alabama, and Mississippi within a 75-to-100-mile service radius.

Allied is part of RAGCO (Rubber and Gasket Companies), a buying group that has grown from 53 to 73 locations during Oesch’s 33-year tenure and is now expanding westward to Oregon. The company stocks a broad range of industrial maintenance items — felt, leather, cork, non-asbestos materials, red rubber, conveyor belting and hydraulic hose and fittings — with hydraulic hose and fittings alone accounting for roughly 35% of business locally.

Three months later, the owner of Allied Hose & Belting is operating out of a 7,500-square-foot temporary space about 250 yards north on the same street at 145 N. Conalco Drive — down from 11,000 square feet at the original location — and steering a rebuild that will be finished – at the earliest – in February, 2027.

Investigators kept Allied off the site for about three-and-a-half weeks. By the time Oesch’s team got back inside, only a handful of tools were salvageable.

“Most everything was burned down,” Oesch said. “The fire originated in the men’s bathroom …  two employees opened the door, saw flames, ran for fire extinguishers, and tried to knock the blaze down.

“It was so hot, and it grabbed the air, and it came back in, right in their faces.”

Oesch said one employee was burned on the face, another on the neck. Both refused emergency transport.

When the fire reached Allied’s rubber inventory — petroleum-based by nature — it accelerated.

“Windows blew out from the heat,” Oesch said. “Black smoke obscured the building entirely for a minute or two before settling into a steady burn that wrapped all four sides.

Oesch had praise for one Jackson firefighter who had stopped by the plant earlier that same day to pick up a hydraulic hose for the department, and who returned that night to fight the fire on the building’s left side.

He was less complimentary of the response on the opposite side, where he said an aerial ladder truck sat for more than 40 minutes before engaging — contributing, in his view, to the heavier damage on that side of the structure.

Building back smaller — for now

The temporary space wasn’t built for what Allied does. Oesch’s team had to install 220-volt three-phase electrical service, plumbing, and compressed air lines before the plant could operate.

“That work finished about two weeks (ago), and the company is now back-up and running at roughly 80 to 90 percent of normal inventory levels,” Oesch said. “Demolition of the original building is expected to begin within two weeks.”

Oesch said the rebuild will sit “on the same footprint” and may go slightly larger “if I can afford it.”

“The biggest scheduling constraint isn’t labor or design,” Oesch said. “It’s materials. Lead times are running 10 to 13 weeks across multiple manufacturers, a hangover from post-COVID supply chains compounded by widespread rebuilding from the recent regional ice storm.

“We thought it would be earlier than that, but the contractor says there’s no way.”

In the meantime, Allied is leaning on its second location in Waverly to keep customers across West Tennessee, Western Kentucky, and parts of Missouri, Alabama, and Mississippi supplied.

Not his first turnaround

If anyone in West Tennessee industrial supply has done this before, it’s Oesch.

He arrived in Jackson 33 years ago on short notice — a planned move to Missouri was rerouted on a Thursday with instructions to be in Jackson by Monday — and stepped into a location that was more than $400,000 in debt with no money for Friday’s payroll.

On a Wednesday morning, a long-overdue $10,200 customer check arrived, thanks what Oesch said was Divine Intervention.

Oesch put the check in a savings account and used it to pay employees that Friday. He repeated the routine, $10,000 at a time, every two weeks for 22 months. He also called all 60 of Allied’s vendors personally — six of whom had Allied on credit hold — and negotiated $1,000 weekly payments until each was paid off.

Aeroquip, one of those vendors, eventually sent Oesch a half-page letter from its vice president congratulating him for keeping his word.

“It was touch and go every single week,” Oesch said of those 22 months. “But the Lord made it happen.”

What’s next

For Allied’s customers — industrial buyers who depend on quick turnaround for hydraulic hose, conveyor belt, gasketing, and the long list of maintenance items the company stocks — the message is straightforward – Allied is open, inventory is largely restocked, and the rebuild is in motion.

For Oesch, who has spent half his career in Jackson, the next year is about getting back to the address customers know.

“We’re rolling, rolling right now,” Oesch said. “We’re really getting things going.”