A Texas state legislator says he’ll investigate how a peanut processing plant was able operate nearly four years without a license or being inspected.
The state alleges the plant’s owner, Peanut Corporation of America, never obtained a license and never registered it as a food manufacturer so the state never knew to inspect it, yet a state inspector drove by Plainview, Texas, plant on his way to other inspections.
State Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, told the newspaper he plans to ask his Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee to dig into what went wrong at the peanut plant, including why the state failed to inspect it, saying, “It’s almost like a plane crash. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this to be sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Texas officials only discovered the Plainview plant’s existence after PCA’s other peanut operation, in Blakely, Ga., was connected to a nationwide salmonella outbreak in January which to date has sickened nearly 700 people in 45 states and killed nine, the Morning News said.
The local newspaper knew about the plant. They wrote about the contract. Can Texas politicians read?