It is five years since the Imperial Sugar plant burst into a fiery hell that ultimately killed 14 workers and injured dozens more, five years of the world moving on through other tragedies, both natural and man-made.
While the ledger of disasters always seems a crowded place, some never lose their grip, particularly for those who managed to live through them.
Cinnegan White survived the Imperial inferno on that night when the very air inside the Port Wentworth plant caught fire and the world, shaking and angry, seemed to turn molten.
He swears it was a voice that saved him.
It was Feb. 7, 2008, somewhere around 7:15 p.m.
White, a liquid sugar operator, was leaving the laboratory.
“A voice came over me and told me to go back to my area,” White said.
In your head?
“Yeah,” he said. “It was speaking to me, ‘Go back to your area.’”
Whether it was his spirituality or just gut instinct, White trusted that voice.
He turned to leave and, crossing a catwalk, was about to walk down some steps when, within seconds:
“The explosion occurred,” White said. “I was blown down two flights of steps. Where I was at was the main part of the lab where so many lives were lost, where they found a lot of the bodies at.”
Five years later, the telling freezes White in the nightmarish memory of what came next. He answers each question promptly and then stops, as if expanding on the answer will only make the memory worse.
Slowly, he continued.
“I just got up and run for cover,” he said. ”I realized the fire was behind me.”
He sought shelter behind a building that housed the molasses station, staying there until he heard a young man’s voice yell for help. He looked up to a terrible sight.
“His clothes were burned off him,” White said. “He was staggering. I gave him my shirt. I put my arm around his neck, and I carried him to the front.
“At that point, I saw people burned, smoke coming off them, not from their clothes, but from their skin burning. Individuals crying. You could hear people in the building hollering for help. Just total chaos.”
White, now 49, was one of the lucky ones — he would correct that to one of the blessed ones — to come through alive and without critical injuries. He went to the hospital the next morning because of back pain and was fortunate to escape surgery, requiring only traditional rehabilitation that allowed him to return to work.
In March 2010, he said, Imperial fired him, claiming he violated a safety rule while loading a truck. He believes the termination had more to do with the still-pending lawsuit he filed against Imperial after the inferno.
“Not many days pass without you thinking about it,” he said of that tragic Thursday night in 2008. “If I get three or four hours of sleep a night, I’m doing good.
And the lesson?
“You can’t take nothing for granted. Life is so precious. All the people that passed and got hurt, all we did was went to work … you always thought you was coming home that evening when you was going to work.”
Back to business
The Imperial Sugar refinery sits just upriver from the Georgia Ports Authority on the west bank of the Savannah River.
On any given day, as much as 30 million pounds of refined sugar and between 180 million and 200 million pounds of unrefined sugar sit packaged or in bulk in its warehouses and silos.
The unrefined sugar comes in by ship from around the world, from as close as Louisiana or Florida, from as far away as South America and the Philippines.
The refined sugar goes out to the consuming world in a variety of grades — light and dark brown, powdered and extra-fine — and by a variety of means, rail cars and trailer trucks providing the bulk of transport.
Imperial sells it by bag or by rail car. There are the two-pound bags you buy in the grocery store and commercial packaging that ranges from 50-pound bags for a neighborhood bakery to those that weigh nearly a ton.
It is a staggering, somewhat incongruous operation, partly rust-belt industrial revolution, partly state-of-the-art technology, stretching over 140 acres. It employs about 350 people and runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week when demand is strong.
“Our production capacity is basically back to what the facility was designed for,” said Brian Harrison, Imperial’s sugar industrial manager. “We can do up to 6 million pounds a day.”
Harrison, dressed as all the Imperial workers in dark overalls, hard hat, steel-toed shoes and safety glasses, talked as he moved through the redesigned packing building, maintaining just enough volume above the din that you could hear the lilt of his southern Louisiana drawl.
He is a sugar lifer, having spent the last 32 years with Imperial. He lives in Louisiana but spends roughly half of each month on site in Port Wentworth.
He was at Imperial’s corporate headquarters in Sugarland, Texas, on Feb. 7, 2008, when disaster rained down on the plant. The next day he was here to help start the process of reconstituting the blistered refinery, a project that ultimately cost about $220 million.
“I didn’t leave for two years,” he said.
He was in charge of rebuilding the plant. First came the external demolition of the scarred portions in October 2008. Then came the resumption of refinery operations in the summer of 2009 and packaging in February 2010.
But central to his duties was helping to incorporate engineering changes within the redesign necessary to make the plant safer and to help prevent another tragedy.
He pointed to the floor under his feet.
“These floors have a carbon element to reduce static electricity,” he said.
He then pointed to eye-wash and shower stations, fire extinguishers and the sprinkler system.
“We have two areas of concern: Food safety and personal safety,” Harrison said.
The former is addressed by fairly traditional means: Among other precautions, the company has X-ray machines to make sure no metal or foreign objects adulterate the final product, as well as a computerized system that can track every pallet of sugar to its final destination.
“In case we ever have to have a recall,” he said.
Worker safety paramount
But those seem dwarfed by the redesigned production elements to help ensure worker safety in the wake of the combustible dust explosions and fires that ripped through the plant in 2008.
Dust, as those events have shown, is the great, lurking, combustible enemy in many industries.
“It’s not just in sugar,” said Beth Rosenberg, a board member of the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. “It’s in food processing. It’s in metal processing. It’s in wood processing and plastics.”
The danger in sugar refining comes with the accumulation of sugar dust, which then can be ignited by spark or excessive heat, leading to a chain-reaction series of explosions, as sugar dust particle after particle ignites. Fires with an immense, scorching heat erupt, leading to more tiny explosions and more fire and more explosions, on down the line.
“It can be normal operation one minute and then the plant shakes or vibrates and suddenly, all this dust, perhaps hundreds or thousands of pounds of dust, is in the air and it ignites,” said Daniel Horowitz, a CSB board member.
Imperial’s new safety features target those dangers, from the unloading of the raw sugar to its refining, storage and packaging. The goal is to drastically reduce or eliminate the presence and collection of combustible sugar dust.
Sugar is no longer transported through the production process by blowing it through pipes. Instead it is pushed under pressure to take oxygen out of the equation. All power lines are isolated from the production areas, and the elevators are equipped with special bearing-temperature sensors.
There are increased ventilation and dust collection systems, as well as state-of-the-art fire suppression systems designed to respond to changes in air pressure, using sodium bicarbonate to remove oxygen from an affected area if a fire occurs.
“With the new design, everything is isolated and contained,” Harrison said. “The whole system is based on isolation, containment and suppression.”
Regulatory efforts grind on
The CSB this week reiterated its stance that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should move immediately to draft national combustible dust safety standards across a variety of industries.
“Over the last 20 years, there have been approximately 281 explosions and fires due to combustible dust,” Rosenberg said. “Deaths continue to happen because of this problem, which is why we need this standard.”
OSHA said that standard is coming, but it won’t be until the intricate and often glacial regulatory process has run its course.
“Absolutely, there will be a standard,” said U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor Jordan Barab, pointing out that combustible dust has been on OSHA’s regulatory agenda for nearly two years. “This was the first new item to go on the agenda for this administration, so we are very serious about it.”
The lingering question now, as it has been for five years, is whether the federal Justice Department, acting on OSHA’s finding of “fatalities as a result of willful violation,” will pursue a criminal prosecution against Imperial or any of its executives.
As it has for five years, the Savannah office of the U.S. Attorney declined to comment.