A huge fire at a plastics plant in Ontario could have far-reaching effects in the Pee Dee.

The fire at QM Products in Lakeshore, Ontario, burned for 20 hours, forcing the evacuation of residents from the area around the plant.

The company built plastic parts for ATVs made at the Honda of South Carolina Manufacturing Inc. plant in Timmonsville, and Honda officials said they're working to assure they'll have a supply of parts to continue operations.

"We're assessing the situation right now, trying to determine the effects it will have on our production," Jeff Helton, of Honda of South Carolina, said.

Though the fire started late Sunday night, it continued to burn until Monday night, and fire inspectors weren't able to get into the remains of the building until Tuesday.

"We do have a team there in Lakeshore right now," said Dane Espenschied, assistant vice president and plant manager at Honda's Timmonsville plant. "They've been there since Monday morning to assess things, and we're getting reports from them every couple of hours. Our plan is to continue operating."

Espenschied said the supply situation wouldn't immediately affect the 1,800 associates working at the Timmonsville facility. But if Honda can't find another supplier, or if QM Products can't shift production to another plant, such as the one it has in Orangeburg, the fire in Ontario could affect more than just the Timmonsville plant associates. The company has suppliers all over the Pee Dee, which could be impacted by any slowdown in operations in Timmonsville.

Experts in manufacturing logistics said the situation is one of the drawbacks to "just-in-time delivery," a system of delivering parts to manufacturers just as they are needed, instead of warehousing a large supply of parts.

"When you look at strategic models, one of the problems is having too few suppliers," said Hari Rajagopalan, assistant professor of operations management at Francis Marion University. "There's a definite danger in having too few vendors."

Rajagopalan said most manufacturers have several suppliers. When one of them can't deliver, it can disrupt production.

"You want to have a backup plan for something like this," he said. "It's like computer systems. You want to have a redundancy built into the system. Of course, it is more expensive to build redundancy into a manufacturing facility than it is to build it into a computer system."

The Ontario plant fire is affecting more than Honda of South Carolina, said Chris Thompson, a reporter at the The Windsor (Ontario) Star newspaper who covered the story.

"We thought this would have some pretty far-reaching effects," he said. "It's thrown quite a few people out of work here, but the company also makes parts for a Chrysler plant here in Windsor, and we're waiting to see how the fire will affect employees there."

Thompson said QM Products is trying to salvage molds for parts it makes. If it is able to salvage molds for Honda's parts, the company might be able to send them to the QM plant in Orangeburg, which also makes parts for the Timmonsville plant.

"We single-source a lot of our parts," Helton said. "And their plant in Orangeburg also makes parts for us."

-- WBTW News13 contributed to this report.