Another fire broke out at a Novo Nordisk facility on Wednesday, marking the second fire at one of the drugmaker's sites in under a week.
This fire destroyed an office building at the company’s headquarters campus in Bagsværd, Denmark.
The fire started outside a building and spread to an adjacent one. While the fire is now under control, the office site was not able to be saved, a Novo spokesperson said over email.
The office building was one of several the drugmaker has in Bagsværd and the fire did not hit the company's main headquarters facility. All activity in the impacted area should be “back to normal” by Thursday, according to the spokesperson.
No one was injured, Novo's spokesperson said.
At around 2:40 p.m. local time, a local fire service chief told Bloomberg News that extinguishing the fire was expected to take another four to six hours.
The structure is a “quite large multi-story building” with a high risk of collapse that poses a challenge for extinguishing work, the fire chief added. Workers in surrounding buildings were evacuated.
Large, thick smoke clouds were visible over the building and billowed over a nearby highway, according to a news clip posted by news outlet Nexta on X. Novo said the smoke was not toxic.
Last week, a separate fire occurred on the roof of a building under construction at Novo’s key Kalundborg, Denmark, manufacturing hub. No one was injured there, either, and the company said it expected to impact on “overall construction timelines."
That site is part of a massive manufacturing expansion effort by Novo Nordisk to boost capacity “across the entire global value chain” by 2029. The upgrade will also create about 1,200 jobs.