One welder's Fatal Snaffoo. 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
This is the personal account of a tragic event that occurred on March 4th 1997 near the outskirts of Merced, a small town in the heart of California's Central Valley. The accident happened at my father's trucking company, a local transporter of petroleum based products. One of our brand new trucks rolled in the yard after making a delivery of a kerosene-based oil product that is used in the refinement production of an asphalt sealing product known as fuel oil. This product is loaded into insulated semi-trailers tankers at 470 degrees. After the driver made his delivery and returned to Merced he stopped off to fuel at a local cardlock station. After fueling his truck he then filled a five gallon bucket with diesel fuel and climbed atop the forty-five foot tanker-trailer, opened the domelid and poured the diesel into the tanker. (This is a normal procedure employed to keep the valves from freezing up as the product otherwise solidifies when cooled.) Upon arrival at the company yard the driver wrote up a repair order to patch a small hole in the forward section of the tanker. The usual precaution in this situation would be to park the trailer, open up all product loading/off-loading valves and install blower fans through the domelids to dryout and cool off tanker interior before any repairs are to be made. For some unknown reason our mechanic, with four years of experience repairing these types of tankers neglected to follow company protocol and common sense. He immediately pulled the truck and trailer into the small shop area. Only the Freightliner tractor and front third of the trailer fit into the shop with the rest protruding onto the ramp area. He seemed to be in a bad mood, I was performing a routine inspection on another truck parked about 50 ft behind that trailer. He climbed onto of the trailer opened the dome lid looked inside and closed it back up, (Apparently.) He then and unbuttoned the outer aluminum shell to reveal the product-soaked insulation. After scrapping off as much as he could with a putty knife he decided to use heat to melt off the remaining product to create a clean surface in order to make a weld that plug the hole. At this time, luckily for me a customer entered the yard to purchase some road sealer that we stored at the yard for pothole repair. While I was helping the customer he fired up a cutting torch to melt the remaining product from the side of the trailer. In doing so the torch flame entered the tank cavity through a tiny crack igniting the volatile fumes inside the tank. I was walking back towards the shop when I heard this unnerving whooshing sound (which apparently was air being sucked into the tanker through that tiny crack). A moment later I saw a huge mushroom cloud and felt an enormous concussion from the explosion. The latter third of the tanker shot out in a straight line leaving a cylinder shaped cloud of coal black smoke like that of a rocket. The rear portion of the trailer slammed violently into the truck I had just been inspecting a few minutes before. The impact moved the truck several feet(all emergency parking brakes on the truck and projectile trailer were engaged). At point of impact the trailer was stopped by the truck and hung in mid-air what seem to be an eternity before gravity slammed it relentlessly downward onto the burning concrete pad. I then scurried up to the pad to find our mechanic standing there screaming, I noticed his once high and tight military flat-top hair style was cinged into tiny balls smoldering with smoke wafting up towards the heavens. He stood there stark-naked with what was left of his coveralls laid out on the cement slab behind his frame attached to him only around the ankles by the re-inforced cuffs of his pantlegs. His arms were outstretched towards the ground. The skin from his hands was peeled back like an open can of sardines at the wrists. Twenty minutes later the medi-vac helicopter arrived from nearby Modesto to take him to a burn unit in Fresno, a week later he succumbed to his injuries. See aftermath PICS at->
http://www.PictureTrail.com/gid226962
By Fredrick C. Fairbairn
@ Psyleo7@aol.com Submitted on 11/07/2003
Submitted by:
Fredrick C. Fairbairn
Reference:
Merced Sun-Star March 5th 1997
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