‘Once you get an ignition source, boom’
Outside embattled barrel-refurbishing plants, exploding drums have killed or maimed dozens
On a blustery March afternoon, Jon Rygiel was outside his family’s business in Cadott, cutting the lid off a 55-gallon steel drum to make a trash barrel.
The 24-year-old mechanic was tidying up the shop, Greener Acres Transmissions, instead of heading out to collect maple syrup as he had planned.
As his cutting torch flame punched a tiny hole in the sealed drum’s lid, it ignited oil fumes trapped inside.
An explosion sent the lid sailing across the street and the torch handle flying into Rygiel’s head, tearing an 8-inch gash in the side of his head. The blast was heard across the town of about 1,500 people in Chippewa County.
The heat from the flames melted his safety glasses. The March 12, 2015, accident left Rygiel in a coma for more than a month and living in medical care facilities for more than a year.
It wasn’t as uncommon as it might seem.
Just weeks ago, on Nov. 17, it happened to a cheese plant employee in Rosendale while he was cutting a drum in the plant’s vehicle shop. And it happened in March 2013 to a mechanic in Hudson, who had nearly every bone in his face broken.
There was the construction company employee in Richmond, Texas. The farm worker in Woodburn, Ore. The welder, with 30 years of experience, in Elkhart, Ind.
A UPS driver found Wang on the shop floor in a pool of blood. Police found Wang’s blood on the ceiling, his broken safety glasses, the bent cutting torch and the crumpled top of the 55-gallon steel drum.
Dozens more
A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found at least 69 deaths and scores of injuries from drum fires and explosions at businesses and homes in the past 15 years.
The tally does not include incidents in plants that recycle or refurbish used chemical containers, the focus of an earlier Journal Sentinel examination that has prompted investigations from at least five state and federal agencies.
It is difficult to establish the full number of exploding-drum incidents outside the workplace or at small businesses where there wasn’t an official investigation.
In many cases, however, the Journal Sentinel found the injuries and deaths stem from strikingly similar circumstances that are repeated year after year.
A hot tool, such as a cutting torch, comes into contact with a mixture of air and a flammable vapor in an emptied drum. In a flash, the barrel becomes a bomb.
It’s the vapor, not the liquid, that catches fire.
“Once you get an ignition source, boom, there’s the explosion,” said Michael Fox, founder of Chemical Accident Reconstruction Services in Tucson, Ariz.
Unseen workplace hazard
In Hudson, Chad Wang nearly died when a steel drum blew up in his face at the Hudson Golf Course maintenance shop where he worked as a mechanic.
Wang was alone in the shop that day, March 22, 2013.
He was cutting the lid off the drum, which had contained waste oil and gasoline, when it exploded with enough force to put a large dent in the metal ceiling. A UPS driver making a delivery found him on the shop floor in a pool of blood with severe head injuries. Wang, 35, didn’t know how long he was on the floor but said it could have been several hours.
When police arrived, they wondered if he had been the victim of an assault; it looked as if someone had beaten him with a fire extinguisher. But there was no sign of a struggle, no footprints leading away from the scene.
Then they found Wang’s blood on the ceiling, his broken safety glasses, the bent cutting torch and the crumpled top of the 55-gallon steel drum.
Wang, a married father of three, was hospitalized for 78 days and underwent surgeries that included removing injured parts of his brain and putting metal plates in his face where every bone but one, his jawbone, was broken.
After months of physical therapy, he is now working as a welder in a shop that makes steel doors. The accident still weighs on his mind when he picks up a cutting torch, but he is getting his life back together.
“I am doing good now,” he said. “As good as I am going to get, anyway.”
The same thing happened this fall to Travis Klotzbach, 36, at Knaus Cheese Inc. in Rosendale. He was hospitalized with burns and broken bones when a 55-gallon steel drum he was working on blew up.
It was shortly after 7 a.m. Nov. 17; Klotzbach was cutting the empty drum with a torch when it exploded.
He suffered injuries to his legs, back and face, according to the Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s Department.
Earlier problems
Often, a serious accident wasn’t a company’s first brush with danger, according to reports from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration examined by the Journal Sentinel.
In 2013, SCR Construction Co. of Richmond, Texas, was placed in the agency’s “severe violator enforcement program” and was issued $131,670 in penalties after employee Feliciano Ramirez-Puerta was killed in an explosion.
Ramirez-Puerta, 49, was cutting 55gallon drums that safety officials said were marked as containing a cleanser. His cutting torch triggered an explosion that shook a building and left him dead at the scene.
“SCR was aware of a near miss involving ignition and over-pressurization of another drum just weeks before the fatal explosion and did nothing to address it, which could have prevented this tragedy,” Mark Briggs, an OSHA official in Houston, said in a news release.
The construction company was issued 17 safety violations, 12 of them classified serious, including a “willful” violation for failing to thoroughly clean drums containing flammables before welding or cutting.
The company did not respond to questions from the Journal Sentinel.
On Dec. 31, 2014, Larry Sanders should have been celebrating New Year’s Eve.
Instead, the 51-year-old welder was killed while cutting the bottom from a chemical drum at Green Stream Co., a pallet recycler in Elkhart, Ind.
Sanders, known as “Bird” to his family, suffered burns over nearly 85% of his body, according to an Indiana workplace accident report.
The report revealed seven serious safety violations, including a 55-gallon drum containing a flammable liquid, believed to be lacquer thinner, that wasn’t labeled as a hazardous chemical.
Green Stream was fined $17,000, and it wasn’t the first time the company was cited for workplace safety violations.
Earlier in 2014 it was fined $3,300. And this June it faced $12,000 in penalties for three serious safety violations.
The company did not respond to calls from the Journal Sentinel.
Thomas McGarity, a University of Texas law school professor who has consulted for OSHA, said the agency’s ability to hold employers accountable has been “woefully inadequate” for decades.
In 2016, McGarity co-authored a study titled “When OSHA Gives Discounts on Danger, Workers Are Put At Risk.”
The report noted that the agency often agrees to substantially reduced fines in exchange for a company’s promise to fix a hazard promptly. Thus, McGarity said, employers often treat the fines as a cost of doing business.
In Tennessee, regulators said a trucking company engaged in dangerous practices that apparently led to the death of Joseph Mack, a 43-year-old mechanic.
Mack suffered second- and third-degree burns over 90% of his body in an Oct. 17, 2016, explosion and fire at R&L Carriers of Knox County.
Before he died, Mack told a fire investigator he had been working on the brake lights of a trailer. He heard a hissing sound and several 55-gallon steel drums exploded in fire.
Fire investigators said one of the drums — containing diesel fuel additive — had an open valve, which spilled its contents on the ground. Also, employees had used a nail to punch a vent hole in some of the drums, allowing flammable vapor to escape.
Investigators said the blast could have been triggered by a spark from an electrical outlet coming into contact with the chemicals in the drum. They said it could have even been triggered by static electricity.
The fire was intense enough to warp the building’s steel roof. Damages were estimated at $500,000.
Safety officials sought $25,600 in penalties for five serious violations and settled for $16,200. The company did not respond to calls asking about the accident.
In March, an empty drum that had been around for years exploded at Iverson Family Farms in Woodburn, Ore., killing 46-year-old Ruben AndradeGarcia.
It was 8:26 a.m. March 21, and the longtime farm employee was cutting the lid off a drum to make a trash container, something he had done many times before. Some of the drums on the farm had contained motor oil and antifreeze, among other things.
Andrade-Garcia was working alone in the maintenance shop when employees in another building heard a loud boom. They came running.
They found him, wearing welding gloves and safety glasses, lying on the ground. He was unconscious but breathing; the cutting torch was still operating in his hand.
The drum previously held brakewash fluid, which is flammable, and it could have been on the farm more than a decade, said Barb Iverson of the familyowned business, which includes a tulip farm.
“It was an old barrel,” she said. Since Andrade-Garcia’s death, Iverson said, farm employees are no longer allowed to cut steel drums even with safety precautions.
Oregon safety officials cited the farm with three serious safety violations including not cleaning flammables from drums prior to cutting and welding. They issued $3,800 in penalties.
The exploding-drum cases often fall into a regulatory gap.
State and federal environmental agencies, and the U.S. Department of Transportation, are tasked with regulating the drum industry. Fire and police departments, along with OSHA, investigate accidents.
But while OSHA is responsible for overseeing workplace safety, the agency inspects only about 1% of workplaces a year. Often, it visits a business only after there’s been an accident or a complaint filed.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulates hazardous chemicals and the disposal of drums, but it doesn’t get into many places unless there’s been a large-scale incident such as a chemical spill.
Drums in the explosion cases examined by the Journal Sentinel were presumed to be safe because they were empty. Often, that was a fatal mistake.
“What I would like to see the industry add is additional warnings that ‘an empty drum is not safe,’” said Fox, of Chemical Accident Reconstruction Services.
‘As bad as it could get’
After the 2015 blast in Cadott, Jon Rygiel underwent six hours of emergency surgery. One doctor told his family he would be surprised if Rygiel made it through the first night.
His injuries were something doctors said they would have expected from a bomb.
Part of his skull was missing. One of his ears was badly torn. He had teeth knocked out.
Doctors even found one missing tooth in his lungs.
“It was as bad as it could get,” said Susan Rygiel, his mother. “He barely made it to the hospital.”
Doctors gave Rygiel a 1-in-10 chance of coming out of a coma and said, even if he did, he would never be able to do much of anything.
He suffered a brain injury, lost sight in his right eye, and — like a stroke victim — had to learn how to walk and talk again.
The 55-gallon steel drum that nearly killed him is still in his family’s transmission shop, a grim reminder of the accident. It’s badly bent, but the little hole where the cutting torch ignited the oil vapor is visible, smaller than a penny.
These days, Rygiel enjoys bow hunting and fishing. He sometimes helps out in the transmission shop but can’t do the work he did before the accident.
His family pushed doctors, hard, to not give up on Jon.
“I feel blessed,” he said.
His physical therapy could take several more years. Early on, at one of the sessions at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, he was given a baseball cap.
It reads: “Farm Boy. Tough as Hell.”