It’s a curious curse. Manufacturing industries in Virginia’s Southside and Southwest Virginia, such as apparel and textiles, had been hammered over the years as global trade sent jobs overseas. So, it came as a pleasant surprise that some sectors, such as auto parts, got a huge lift during the late 1990s. As demand for cars soared from 15 million units to an unexpected high of nearly 18 million units last year, Detroit scrambled to get the differential gears, air bags and drive trains to make cars and trucks. Demand boomed even more as affluent Yuppies favored bigger and bulkier sport utility vehicles that needed bigger and bulkier parts.

That was all very good news for small New River Valley communities such as Radford, which boasts a small university and not too much else. New River Castings, a local auto parts foundry owned by Intermet Corp. of Troy, Mich., was working 24/7 churning out parts for auto suspensions. Not far away, a new Pulaski County plant started churning out Volvo trucks. As auto-related jobs boomed, the labor pool dried up and even local Wal-Marts and McDonalds were paying top dollar for low-level jobs.

It may have sounded too good to be true — and it was. On March 5, a tremendous blast at New River Castings killed three workers and injured 10 others. The blast forced the layoffs of nearly the entire work force of more than 300 for six months as Intermet scrambled to repair the foundry damage. Demanding and dirty work at the foundry had resulted in a 60 percent turnover rate. State investigators suspect that the stressed-out nature of operations may have led to safety lapses that contributed to the blast. Intermet had faced such problems before. By chance, five months before the Radford explosion, I happened to interview Intermet chairman and CEO John Doddridge for a BusinessWeek story about manufacturing meltdown. He told me that he badly underestimated demand and "we had huge, huge turnover of labor and breakdowns at plants."

Today, a rebuilt New River Castings is on the verge of gearing up to normal operations. The work force, many of them new, are getting extra safety training. The economy is cooling and that may give the manufacturing sector a breather. Volvo’s truck operation, in fact, is laying some workers off because higher diesel prices have cooled truck demand.