The factory was built solid. The walls were concrete blocks. But they didn’t hold up the building. Big steel columns did that job. The concrete blocks just separated inside from outside. A forklift could go through them like a kid’s toy blocks. The big loader would have a time bending the columns. They were that strong.
The block walls were hit sometimes. You could see where they were patched. And a few columns were bent. One time the engineer had to look at the roof and a few other columns. The loader driver was suspended two days for that one. The forklift drivers were never suspended for hitting the blocks. We’d never get any work done. It happened that often. The casuals came in and patched the block walls over and over again. The boss wanted to replace the block walls with sheet metal, but the money was never there. That wouldn’t stop the damage anyway. Not the way these guys drove.
The loader driver wanted to quit after he got suspended. But he couldn’t. He was sixty-three. Two more years till retirement. The kids on the forklifts could quit any time and get on somewhere else for more money. Even the way they drove. Not Artie. Not at his age.
The kids on the forklifts quit all the time. The boss kept bringing more in from India. His old country. They worked cheap and did what they were told. The ones that quit, sometimes they were fired from their new jobs. Can’t get away with driving into walls everywhere. The boss hired ‘em back. Back at the bottom of the pay scale. They never complained. It was us or ten bucks an hour at McDonald’s. In this town there was work for everyone. Until the fire.
It wasn’t us that caught fire. It was the refinery. We heard the big siren wail. It was 8:30 on Tuesday. The safety guy woke up real quick. He called across the street. They told him it wasn’t a drill. But they had it under control.
At 8:45 the siren was still going. That’s when we saw the black smoke. Lots of it. The safety guy took a binder and went to see the boss. It was a red binder with ERP on the side.
He was still in with the boss at nine. The smoke was spreading. It covered the old tank farm next door. I radioed the boss and asked if we were shutting down. He said “Keep working. They say they’ve got it under control, they’ve got it under control.”
I was on the roof when the first tank went up. I was fixing the lime elevator. I heard a new siren, louder. I turned and saw the lid of a tank fly a hundred feet in the air. No fireball, just a flying tank lid. Must have been a diesel tank. I felt the air hit me like a big truck speeding by. Then the tank lid landed.
It landed on a big set of pipes. The flash was like looking at the sun. I rolled off the high roof onto the lower roof. It was eight feet down. I broke my arm, but I was lucky. When that explosion hit, the lime tank came down. Good thing it was just lime. I was covered in white powder. I was coughing like a motherfucker. But I was lucky. Joe was on the ground where the tank came down. I could hear him screaming. But not for long.
I looked at our tank farm across the yard. Lube oil was oozing out of the lube tank. Light oil was pouring out of the coater tank. The berm was filling up. Then our siren started.
I got up and limped to the west side of our roof. My knee ached with every step. I hopped down the stairs, leaning on the guardrail. I was two steps from the bottom when the building shook. When I was a kid, lightning hit a tree twenty feet away from me. This explosion was louder than that. Way louder. There were cracks between the concrete blocks in the wall. Thank God the refinery was on the other side of the building. But so was the muster point in the parking lot.
I looked at our tank farm. The berm was overflowing now. Five kinds of oil were pouring over the edge of the yard, down to the creek. Someone would freak out about that.
“Jeez, Ted, you okay?”
I turned and saw Peter along with some of the young guys. All of them had names ending in ‘inder’ and ‘deep’. More guys were coming out of the building. We were all walking south along the wall.
“Muster point not safe?” I asked.
“Jesus, fuck,” said Peter. “I saw it through the window when that big explosion hit. Windows blew out and all the cars were pushed over like toys. Some of the guys were at the muster point already, mostly office guys. After the explosion, they weren’t moving. Mike came on the radio, told us all to get out the west side and walk down the south forty.”
“What about the guys at the muster point?” I asked.
“Mike took Tejinder and Troy to give first aid. Lucky’s calling nine-one-one but I think they’ll have a hard time getting here. Cars are scattered all across ninety-first.”
There was another explosion. The building beside us rocked. More cracks appeared between the blocks. We walked a little farther away from the wall.
“I don’t think those guys are gonna make it,” said Peter.
The big siren at the refinery had stopped.
“You mean their guys or our guys?” I asked.
“I mean our guys. Their guys are fucked for sure.”
An ambulance came up our south access road, where we were heading for. It drove to the east side of the building.
“Just one?” asked Peter. “They’ll need more than that.”
“I think his buddies are busy across the street,” I said.
“Yeah, no shit. I wonder how many people are dead over there.”
There were a couple dozen of us now. We reached the south end of the building. We looked across to the east yard. The loader stood there.
“Artie!” Peter said. He ran to the loader and climbed up to the cab. His shoulders sagged. Then he looked north. He stood with his mouth open. The rest of us looked north. The building was in the way, but the black smoke covered half the sky. Peter walked back.
“You don’t even want to look,” he said. He started walking south again. I limped behind him. He turned and saw me limping.
“Fuck, sorry,” he said, and got under my arm again.
We walked up our access road, between pallets full of shingles. Finally we turned the corner and went out the Fifty-fourth Street gate. We all turned to look north.
There was no sky. Just a wall of black smoke. There were orange flames coming from tanks. There were yellow flames coming from pipes. There were orange and black flames coming from a lake of oil. Those flames were spreading. They reached the two globe-shaped tanks at the east side of the refinery. We couldn’t stop watching. Those were the jet fuel tanks.
They went up a second apart. It was so bright I closed my eyes and could still see it. We were over a mile away. I opened my eyes and saw a wave in the air coming for us.
“Duck!” said Peter.
We all hit the ground. Except Harjit. He flew through the air and landed in the ditch. The rest of us were pushed along the ground. Dirt flew over us. It felt like I was being sand blasted.
Amandeep and Sukhvir went to check on Harjit. Lucky there was water in the ditch. That’s what I thought. There was also a piece of pipe sticking up. Harjit’s buddies were kneeling on the shoulder crying when I limped over. The pipe stuck up through his back. Another one gone. I said a prayer, and heard Peter do the same. We walked on. The rest of the guys followed. Harjit’s buddies came last.
There were more flashes behind us. We hit the ground every time we saw one. But none of them were as big as the jet fuel tanks. We didn’t even turn to look anymore.
We got to the top of the hill. There was a camp set up on the other side. Big white tents.
The doctors saw us right away. My arm got plastered. I got a tensor bandage for my knee. The rest of the guys were looked at and got what they needed.
“Where’s the guys from the refinery?” I asked. The EMT just looked down. Poor kid wasn’t prepared for any of this.
I heard the full story afterwards. The fire crew at the refinery tried to do the job themselves. By the time they called the fire department, the whole place was going up around them. The fire trucks and ambulances rushed in to save who they could. Then the jet fuel tanks went up.
I guess their safety guy never taught them about the safety of the rescuer. I’ll never forget that lecture: “If you can’t rescue a co-worker without putting yourself in danger, do not attempt rescue. Call for emergency help immediately. It’s hard to watch someone in danger and not help, but it’s important not to become another victim.”
I’ll remember that lecture for the rest of my life because even the pros became victims that day. And because that lecture is all that’s left of him. They found him with a first aid kit over his shoulder. He was a good man. They were all good men. Even the ‘inders and ‘deeps who kept backing their forklifts into the walls.
The building’s still standing. The concrete block walls are all cracked, but the big steel columns held. The line is silent, though. Just another company headstone across from the crater on the other side of the street.
Afterword
This story is inspired by a real location, and the people somewhat resemble people I used to know. However, the story is fiction, and all names, words, and actions are products of my imagination.
I started this story as a study in using a different descriptive voice. I woke up in the morning with an idea of how one of my blue-collar acquaintances would describe the building where we work. After I finished the description of the building and the workers, the fire just happened.
It’s a character study as well as a voice study. The point of view character is a relatively senior blue collar worker, but in the end I realized that the main character wasn’t human at all. This is a story about the death of a building. The narrator merely serves to tell the building’s story.
Copyright 2013 by Violet Beckingham, all rights reserved
I Am Violet 