On the last day of her life, Debbie Sheppard, 37, said goodbye to her fiancé, 40-year-old Willie J. Hall, and set off for work. Leaving their mobile home near the small Southwest Virginia town of Riner, she drove to New River Castings Company, an auto parts foundry about a half-hour away in Radford. What happened during the next few hours on March 5 serves as a warning to Virginia companies of the bad things that can happen when times are good – when firms struggle to keep up with booming business.

Sheppard was going in four hours early that cool Sunday evening because high turnover had left the plant short staffed. She didn’t mind working overtime, her fiancé says, because the money was good. In her year at bustling New River, her base pay had gone up to $10.75 an hour — far better than what she had made for 11 years as a seamstress. "The work was tough and dirty and sometimes she came home covered with black dust," says Hall. "But she didn’t mind. She said her coworkers were real nice."

Arriving at the foundry with its tall smokestacks, Ms. Sheppard took her post at core machine No. 3. The assembly-line apparatus melted scrap metal, made molds with sand and a highly volatile gas, and poured the molten steel into the molds. At the end of the line came unfinished car and truck parts such as control rods and differential gear casings. Demand had been tremendous, especially from Daimler-Chrysler and Ford, the company’s biggest customers.

But Intermet Corp., the Troy, Mich.-based firm that owns New River Castings, has had trouble keeping up. With most of its dozen plants around the country running at full throttle, Intermet has had little time for routine maintenance. Workers put in lots of overtime at jobs that are often dirty and dangerous. Many quit in droves. New River’s turnover rate, for instance, has been as high as 60 percent. Replacements hadn’t been getting proper training. "This plant was operating at full capacity," says Thomas E. Woehlke, Intermet’s group vice president for ferrous metals. "Any plant running around the clock has difficulty."

At 9:30 p.m. on that March night, a tremendous blast ripped through the plant. It mushroomed into a giant fireball, consuming Debbie Sheppard and coworkers Karen Anderson Hamilton, 35, and 29-year-old Curtis Grooms. Ten others were injured. The explosion was so powerful that Sheppard’s remains wouldn’t be recovered for four days. When Jeffrey Brown, state Commissioner for Labor and Industry, inspected the wreckage shortly afterward, it brought back haunting memories of his time as a bomber pilot during the Persian Gulf War. "I didn’t see that kind of destruction in Iraq when I flew Navy A-6s," says Brown.

The Intermet story is a tragic example of too much of a good thing. These should be the best of times for the company that last year had revenues of $956 million and is one of the largest independent foundry operators in the country. Intermet has been chalking up record sales as auto production has soared from 16.5 million units to nearly 18 million units in the past year. In a report to shareholders last February, however, Intermet Chairman and CEO John Doddridge complained that unexpected output by auto manufacturers and the "full employment" environment had meant the company was "overwhelmed" with demand. Foundries, he noted, can’t turn on a dime and often need two years to ramp up to new output demands.

Intermet’s troubling example could be replicated by other Virginia firms struggling to meet high demand for goods such as auto parts and building materials. Not only are many companies under pressure to keep assembly lines running by delaying maintenance, but stressed-out workers are quitting for better jobs elsewhere. Training replacements is time consuming and expensive. Commercial insurers who provide coverage for heavy industries in the state, especially relatively dangerous ones such as foundries and chemical plants, are watching the case closely. "When these types of things happen, however tragic, everyone watches," says Joel Nichols, senior executive vice president at Scott Insurance in Roanoke.

As Intermet has learned, scrambling to keep up with demand can cost lives and dollars. At New River, it let maintenance and safety training lapse, according to Brown’s Department of Labor and Industry, which runs the Virginia Occupational Safety and Health Administration (VOSHA), the lead regulatory agency. After a seven-month probe, the state agency slapped Intermet with 31 safety violations and a total of $801,000 in penalties, the largest ever imposed in the commonwealth. The list of violations reads like a script for a Three Stooges skit. State inspectors found duct tape and empty plastic bottles sealing leaks in gas pipelines. Some workers never received the rudiments of safety training. They routinely smoked cigarettes when they worked around inflammable process gasses. Neither company officials nor state regulators even knew that there was a basement underneath the assembly line floor, while state regulations prohibit foundries from having basements.

Intermet officials say that there were lots of things wrong at New River Castings, even though they are disputing the $801,000 in penalties. "There were a lot of violations, we don’t disagree with that," says Alan J. Miller, Intermet general counsel and vice president, who flew to Radford to meet with Virginia Business in October about the accident. The blast is costing the firm $50 million to rebuild the plant. After a massive effort to get the plant back online as quickly as possible, the company began calling employees back to work in October. The facility should be fully operational in early December.

Curtis Grooms Photo courtesy Richmond Times-Disptach

New River’s downtime has put additional pressure on other already-stressed Intermet foundries in Illinois and Georgia. The company reported record sales for the first nine months of the year of $829 million, compared with $716 million for the first nine months of 1999. But problems from the New River blast, coupled with operating woes at other foundries, meant that Intermet reported a decline in earnings from operations in the third quarter.

The biggest costs may be yet to come. The families of the victims are likely to file lawsuits. The cause of the blast has yet to be officially determined. Probes are still underway by the Radford police and commonwealth’s attorney’s office, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. To learn the cause of the explosion both for legal purposes and to protect against accidents at other plants, Intermet has hired Wilfred Baker Engineering, a Houston-based trouble-shooter that probes industrial explosions. In one high-profile case, the Texas firm was hired by Ford to determine the cause of a blast at a power station serving the car maker’s vast River Rouge plant in Michigan that killed one worker and injured 30 others.

The findings will influence the outcome of future civil suits. Investigators want to know what caused the blast, and whether the 31 safety violations found by state regulators contributed to the accident. Intermet General Counsel Miller says that the key question is: "Can you draw a link between the violations and the blast? Obviously, we don’t know." Showing that the blast was caused by factors unrelated to the safety violations would lessen Intermet’s liability. Mark Shulz, manager of process safety for Wilfred Baker, says it has finished its assessment of what caused the blast but declined further comment.

However, Commissioner Brown says that Intermet and his department disagree on what touched the blast off, even though he says it isn’t the role of the Department of Labor and Industry to determine the actual cause of the explosion. Brown suspects that it was caused by a leak of dimethylethylamine (DMEA), a colorless, inflammable gas that helps harden sand used to make castings. Brown says Intermet officials believe that the explosion was caused by a leak from a natural gas pipe that had nothing to do with manufacturing processes, but was used to heat the foundry’s interior.

New River’s previous actions had alerted Brown’s department to problems at the plant. New River Castings had already been on VOSHA’s watch list. In April 1999, the state agency, which is responsible for enforcing federal safety rules, investigated the leak of 55 gallons of DMEA at the plant. A worker sent to check on the leak was not given a respirator or other protective gear. In a separate incident, last June a worker at the plant was crushed and severely injured. Intermet was fined $169,000 for that accident, but it hasn’t paid the fine.

This history is what makes Brown suspect DMEA as the blast culprit. DMEA is two-and-a-half times heavier than air. When it leaks, it tends to pool in unseen clouds in a building’s nooks and crannies. Unknown to both Intermet and regulators, there was a basement underneath the plant’s foundry operations — in violation of regulations. Meanwhile, the foundry had inadequate ventilation, Brown says. So, if DMEA leaked, it is possible that it collected into small clouds between the basement and the first floor of the foundry and remained there for months. In the right combination with air, it can be explosive.

Indeed, on Friday, March 3, workers at New River are rumored to have complained of the smell of gas. Brown says the complaints could not be verified, but suspicions remain. "DMEA smells like rotten eggs," he says. "We believe the explosion was in the basement and there was a cocktail of sludge sand there." Brown thinks that DMEA was also present. "It can reach a flash point in a foundry. Gas will permeate dirt. But there were no fans or other means to vent it, as required."

According to Brown, Intermet officials believe that a leaking natural gas pipeline caused the blast. General Counsel Miller declined comment. Brown is not inclined to believe the natural gas theory. When his investigators recovered the natural gas pipe, they found evidence that an outside force had imploded the metal. "There were no signs [that] the natural gas pipe exploded out," he says. Meanwhile, investigators have learned that valves controlling the DMEA storage tank did not work properly. They believe it was possible that the entire storage tank emptied itself of DMEA gas. Bart McEntire, special agent in charge of the Roanoke office of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms of the U.S. Treasury Dept., declined comment on whether ATF had determined the cause of the blast. He said his office had turned its information over to the local prosecutors.

For now, Brown can’t say if jerry-rigging contributed to the blast. Even so, he says there was plenty of evidence that Intermet lacked a consciousness for safety. "A lot of violations we found were culturally indicative," he says. "For example, you could smoke around flammable materials. That suggests there’s a certain culture there."

Whether the safety violations had a direct link to the blast is a critical element in how Intermet’s commercial insurers, which Intermet officials did not identify, will handle the case. According to Nichols of Scott Insurance, which has no relation to Intermet or the accident, if safety violations contribute to a fatal accident at a factory, generally insurers may not be inclined to continue their coverage in the future, "The first thing you want to do is find out the cause of the accident ... that’s why doing so is of such great interest at New River Castings right now," Nichols says.

Intermet officials point to outside factors that put strain on the plant. For example, says Woehlke, the New River Valley has low unemployment. When Volvo opened a truck-manufacturing plant in nearby Pulaski County, it lured some of New River’s best and most-experienced workers, who were accustomed to shift work and familiar with the machinery used to make auto parts and assemble vehicles. "Many experienced workers went there," says Woehlke. Straining to meet the extremely high demand for production, Intermet had difficulty training and keeping new workers. "There was a lot of competition (because of the low unemployment rate)," says Woehkle. "Home Depot is paying $10 an hour and even McDonald’s is paying $7 an hour."

As they return to work or are hired anew, all workers at New River Castings will undergo more rigorous safety training. The firm has hired a specialist from Roanoke to create new training programs and chemical giant DuPont has contributed some of its safety experts. "We have a special interest in beefing up safety. We are doing things here and at other plants," says Woehkle. Commissioner Brown says that despite the obvious lapses before, Intermet is working hard to get better.