The Hamlet Fire

  ALSO BY BRYANT SIMON

  Everything but the Coffee:

  Learning About America from Starbucks

  Boardwalk of Dreams:

  Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America

  © 2017 by Bryant Simon

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2017

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Simon, Bryant.

  Title: The Hamlet Fire: a tragic story of cheap food, cheap government, and cheap lives / Bryant Simon.

  Description: New York: The New Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014037 (print) | LCCN 2017022986 (ebook) | ISBN 9781620972397 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Imperial Food Products. Plant (Hamlet, N.C.)—Fire, 1991. | Poultry plants—Fires and fire prevention—North Carolina—Hamlet. | Employers’ liability—North Carolina—Hamlet. | Industrial safety—Government policy—United States.

  Classification: LCC TH9449.H2 (ebook) | LCC TH9449.H2 S56 2017 (print) | DDC 363.11/9664930975634—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014037

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  Composition by dix!

  This book was set in Garamond Premier Pro

  Printed in the United States of America

  10987654321

  To my father, Robert Simon, and to his bright memory

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1.Hamlet

  2.Silence

  3.Chicken

  4.Labor

  5.Bodies

  6.Deregulation

  7.Endings

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  A blessing and a curse—that’s how Loretta Goodwin described her job at Imperial Food Products.

  She started processing chicken tenders at the rambling, one-story, red brick factory in Hamlet, North Carolina, on September 14, 1989, not long after celebrating her fortieth birthday. She didn’t mind the job as much as some of her co-workers. Maybe that’s because she knew what hard work was. One of sixteen, she had left school in the tenth grade to pick cotton, tobacco, and peaches to help her family get by. In her twenties, she had served up barbecue sandwiches and cleaned other people’s houses, done their laundry, and made their breakfasts and dinners.1 She was glad to be out of the hot sun and buggy fields, and she was glad to be out of white people’s kitchens and pantries. She was especially glad to leave the nursing home where she had worked for a dozen years before coming to Imperial.

  Goodwin liked that she could weigh a five and half ounce chicken breast in her hand without using a scale. She liked that she could keep up with the speeding production line while others fell behind. What she didn’t like about the job was the sour smell of chicken that clung to her long after her shift ended, or the ice-cold water that dripped off the meat and puddled on the floors, seeping into her shoes and then her socks. She didn’t like how the ceaseless repetition of picking up and putting down frozen blocks of boneless chicken breasts made it feel like there was something inside her hands and fingers “pinching at her flesh.” She didn’t like how the white supervisors hollered at her and sometimes made fun of her clothes and her weight. And she didn’t like that she had to ask them to use the bathroom, or that they sometimes timed her trips to the toilet with a stopwatch and threatened to fire her if she went too often or for too long.2

  Still, Goodwin thanked God for the work. She made $5.50 an hour. That was $1.25 above the federal minimum wage at the time. On payday, she brought home a check for $179. As a single mother with five kids, three still living with her, and no regular child support from her former husband that she could depend on, Goodwin was glad, proud even, to be eking out a living in a place where a steady job at an hourly rate above minimum wage was as hard to find as a cool breeze in the summer or a street without a church on it. “You couldn’t get much else better around here,” Goodwin reflected, assessing the labor market in the 1990s for black women like herself—and increasingly for white women and men across the color line as well—in her hometown and in so many other places across the country where good jobs had disappeared and unions had faded from the scene.3

  But Goodwin’s steady paycheck didn’t change everything. After almost two years on the job, she remained one fall on the slippery floors, one sick child, or one missed shift because of her stiff hands away from sinking below the poverty line.

  On Tuesday, September 3, 1991, the day after Labor Day, the buzzing of the alarm clock woke up Goodwin just before dawn. She didn’t feel like getting out of bed that morning. Something made her feel uneasy about the day ahead. But she did what she always did. She shuffled around her rented house getting ready, avoiding the creaks in the floor so she wouldn’t wake up her children. A little after 7:00 a.m., Ruby Sellers pulled up in front of the house in her puttering four-cylinder compact car. Goodwin didn’t drive, so she got a ride to work from Sellers every morning. At the end of the week, she gave her gas money. They felt the thickness of late summer in the air as they rode through town under overcast skies, passing convenience stores, aging hotels in need of repairs, and the town’s signature building, the Victorian-era train depot with its gables and intricate woodwork. After taking a left on Main Street, they made a right onto Bridges Street. They drove up the hill to the Imperial plant and parked a little beyond the factory in the gravel lot. As they walked inside, they didn’t notice the tractor-trailer sitting at the loading dock or the driver, Rickie Godfrey, asleep at the wheel.

  Once inside, Goodwin stowed her lunch in her locker and sat down in the breakroom. She started to tell her co-workers about how the local police had picked up one of her nephews on some undisclosed charge over the holiday weekend. Before all the details came out, she put on a hairnet and blue plastic smock, grabbed a pair of gloves, and took her place on the line.4

  It was 8:00 a.m.

  Usually, Goodwin worked in the packing area, loading up boxes with breaded, fried, and frozen chicken tenders and marinated boneless chicken breasts headed for Shoney’s, Red Lobster, and Long John Silver’s. That morning, though, the supervisor sent her to the trim room. She didn’t like working there, “messin’ with raw chicken,” as she described the job, but she didn’t say anything.

  The tenders racing by Goodwin that morning were, as one of her co-workers remembered, “beautiful,” “plumb and full of meat.”5 While Goodwin scraped gobs of yellow fat from the frozen chunks of chicken, the maintenance crew huddled in the processing room, studying the hydraulic system that powered the conveyor belt carrying breaded chicken tenders into the cooker at the top of the twenty-nine-foot, three-hundred-gallon Stein fryer. Over the previous couple of months one of the lines powering the belt had been misting and occasionally leaking drops of fluid onto the floor dangerously close to the burners under the fryer. During th
e Labor Day weekend, maintenance workers had again changed the hose that connected the machine box to the conveyor belt. But when the morning crew arrived that Tuesday and looked at the replacement hose, some of them thought that it was too long. They worried that it might drag on the floor and trip one of the women on the line or a foreman as they hurried by the area.

  Part of the problem with the hydraulic system was that the maintenance men didn’t have the precise factory-specified hoses and couplings to fix it. Lead mechanic John Gagnon, his co-worker William Morris remembered, had previously asked Brad Roe, the plant manager and son of the company’s president and chief officer, Emmett Roe, to purchase the right parts. Morris thought Gagnon had even found a place in Charlotte, two hours away by car, that stocked those items. After checking with his father, Morris recalled, Brad Roe said no, as he historically had, because the company didn’t want to pay for new and expensive parts.6 So Gagnon kept doing what he was good at: jerry-rigging things so that the production line would keep moving and Brad Roe wouldn’t badger him over the intercom, as he sometimes did, to hurry up and get things running again. Gagnon tried, as best he could, to maintain some safety standards under these cost-cutting conditions. When he had finished replacing the hose that connected the machine box to the conveyor belt on previous occasions, one worker remembered, he had tugged on it with his hands as hard as he could to make sure it held. When it did, he turned on the pressure.7

  The equipment manual for the Stein fryer, the manual that no one at the plant could find anymore, advised repair crews to turn off its heat sources whenever someone was working around it with flammable products, like hydraulic fluids. Government health and safety officials gave the same advice. When dealing with “hazardous energy,” they strongly recommended, “all power sources [are] to be shut off.”8 But the Imperial maintenance crew knew that the Roes probably wouldn’t like it if they turned the burners under the fryer off because it could take as long as two hours to get it heated back up to 375 degrees, the temperature it was at that morning and the temperature it needed to be to cook chicken tenders golden brown. Turning it off might have been the safe thing to do, but it also would have meant that Goodwin and her co-workers would have been sitting around doing nothing for a while. That would cost the company money, money that it didn’t have in the fall of 1991 as it struggled to pay its mounting debts and stay afloat in the brutally competitive business of making fat- and salt-filled, inexpensive, easy-to-prepare-and-eat fast food products.

  Fifteen minutes or so after Goodwin started “messin’” with that chicken, she heard a loud pop and then a hissing sound, like a missile had been launched inside the plant. She looked behind her to the processing room where the noise was coming from and saw “a big streak of fire ran across the doorway.” She pulled her smock over her face and started to run, but she didn’t know where to go. Imperial managers had never held a fire drill before, and none of the escape routes were lit to indicate where to turn to safely get out of the building.9

  Fire and insurance investigators would later learn that on the morning of the fire, John Gagnon and the Imperial maintenance crew decided to cut the hydraulic hose that was dragging on the ground. As they made the changes, they shut off the hydraulic system but left the burners under the fryer on. They used a hacksaw to cut and shorten the hose before they reconnected it to the machine box.10 No one remembered if Gagnon pulled on the connection this time, but the maintenance men must have trusted that the parts would hold, just like they had in the past. Maybe the cut end of the hose didn’t fit snugly enough, or maybe it was slightly smaller than the fitting, or maybe in a rush to keep things moving they didn’t tighten that coupling quite enough. Whatever the exact reason, only seconds after the mechanics turned the hydraulic line back on to at least 800 pounds per square inch (p.s.i.)—though it sometimes surged to 1,500 p.s.i.—the hose came loose and launched into a wild dance, spewing flammable oil-based Chevron 32 hydraulic fluid in every direction. The liquid hit the concrete floor with enough force that droplets formed and bounced up and down all over the place. Some landed under the gas plumes rising up under the fryer. The heat from the gas vaporized the splashing oil and created the horrible hissing sound that Goodwin mistook for a missile.

  From that point, the fire intensified, greedily feeding on the chicken grease on the floors and the walls and the oils from the fryer and the hydraulic line.

  The blaze immediately created a wall of heat and flames that split the factory in half. Most of the women and men in the packing room and marinating room slipped out the unlocked front door. The line workers and members of the maintenance crew in the trim room and processing rooms ran, like Goodwin did, in the opposite direction, away from the fire toward the side and back of the building, toward the breakroom, equipment room, loading dock, and dumpster.11

  No sprinklers turned on to blunt the blaze. The supposedly flame-retardant Kemlite ceiling tiles hanging over the fryer ignited, adding another surge of heat to the conflagration. Within minutes, the fire melted electric and telephone lines and, eventually, blew a gaping hole in the building’s roof.12

  But for Goodwin and her co-workers it was smoke, not flames, that threatened their lives. The thick, almost velvet-like blankets of yellow and black smoke made it impossible to see. As the line workers, foremen, and supervisors stumbled toward the exits, tears welled up in their eyes, and their lungs felt like there was fire burning inside of them. Without knowing it, they were sucking in lethal amounts of carbon monoxide. The poison in the air replaced the oxygen in their bloodstream, causing shortness of breath, dizziness, and weakened muscles, and clouded the judgment of Goodwin and her co-workers just when they needed to make snap decisions.13

  Unable to see even her hand right in front of her face, Goodwin ran away from the fire, banging into equipment, vats of chicken, and bags of flour as she did. She fell down a few times and her frightened and blinded co-workers stepped on her as they fled. She got up and made it to the far end of the plant, near the loading dock, but she and the others gathered there couldn’t find a way out. The truck with the sleeping driver that she had walked past an hour earlier blocked the loading dock exit. Several people banged on the trailer. One person lay down and found a tiny opening between the vehicle and the building and stayed there sucking whatever fresh air she could.

  A bunch of workers went to the breakroom, but the door to the outside there was locked. A few frantically tried to push an air conditioner out through a window, but it wouldn’t budge. Several stumbled back in the direction of the loading dock, “hollering and screaming,” Goodwin remembered. “Somebody let us out! We’re trapped in here. We’re gonna burn up. We’re gonna die.” When they saw the truck still parked there, they moved a few feet down toward the closest doors, the ones that led outside to the dumpster and the receiving dock.

  A few months earlier, the Roes, trying to stop flies from coming into the plant and workers from going out, blocked one of these exits. The other was locked from the outside with a latch and padlocks. Workers pounded and kicked at this exit, not knowing that it only opened to the inside.

  Unable to escape through the doors near the loading dock or the breakroom, a pack of workers decided to hide in a nearby cooler, hoping to shield themselves from the smoke and the flames. They didn’t realize that this door, the one going into the cooler, wouldn’t shut all the way, and that deadly carbon monoxide gases were oozing into the chamber and into their lungs. A dozen of Goodwin’s friends and co-workers would die inside there from carbon monoxide poisoning, the same thing that killed the others in the plant.

  Seven more people, including several male maintenance workers, perished near the fryer and the blocked exits in the rear of the building near the equipment room and one of the blast freezers.

  As Goodwin made her way in the dark toward the locked exits, Brad Roe, just back from a weekend at the coast and still wearing a white tank top with the words “Myrtle Beach” across the front, was sitting i
n the Imperial office when he realized what had happened. He reached for the phone, though apparently not for the keys to any of the doors. The line was dead, so he jumped into his car and raced over to the Hamlet Fire Department, just a few blocks away. He slammed on the brakes in front of the main entrance and ran inside.

  It was 8:22 a.m.

  “Is anyone here? Is anyone here?” he yelled.

  Captain Calvin White, one of only two firefighters in the building at the time, was in the back making a cup of coffee when he heard Roe’s panicked voice.

  “We got a fire at Imperial Foods. Help us! Help us quick!” Roe blurted out without mentioning, White would later remember, anything about people being trapped inside.14

  Goodwin, meanwhile, decided to stay put near the loading dock and the dumpster. Several of Goodwin’s co-workers fell on top of her and some were underneath her, smothering her in a sandwich of dread and feverish prayers. Somehow, she clawed her way through the arms and legs to get near the top of the heap.15

  Outside the plant, the people in the shotgun houses and rusted metal trailers lining the nearby streets saw the menacing streams of black and yellow smoke shooting out from the hole in the roof at Imperial. The ones closest to the plant heard the chilling screams coming from inside. They roused the driver at the loading dock and got him to move his truck. City workers rushed over with a Trojan tractor. They attached a chain to the dumpster and pried it away from the wall, creating a tight opening. When the gap appeared, someone from the inside shoved Goodwin through the hole. When she got about halfway out, someone on the outside grabbed her by her right arm and slung her to the ground where she landed, coughing and covered in soot.16

  Rescuers would find three people dead near those doors, and three more in the trim room.

  Goodwin squinted as she adjusted her eyes to the hazy morning light. She got up and staggered over to the parking lot where she crouched over and coughed out the soot still stuck in her lungs.17 Trying to catch her breath, she sat down and watched what was going on around her. She saw the ground in front of the plant littered with discarded smocks and rubber gloves. She saw men and women stumble out of the plant, so covered in soot and smoke that she didn’t recognize them at first and didn’t know if they were white or black. She watched as the first two firefighters on the scene rushed from worker to worker, giving them oxygen from the airpacks they carried on their backs and in a few cases doing CPR. As more fire trucks and firefighters from Hamlet and the surrounding towns arrived, the crews put on their gear and began to enter the building.18 Not long after the firefighters went inside, Goodwin saw them bring out the lifeless body of Mary Lillian Wall, who, minutes earlier, had been by her side near the locked door and exit leading to the trash compacter. Then they brought out Bertha Jarrell. Goodwin had grown up with her. Gail Campbell was next.19