The Hamlet Fire

by Bryant Simon

  When the inspector returned the next month with another search warrant, Roe erupted. At first, he told the OSHA representative that he wouldn’t let him inside while they were processing chicken. Then he refused to pull the plant’s Local 12 shop steward off the production line to accompany the inspector on his rounds even though federal law required it. When he finally relented and called for the union agent over the company’s crackling intercom system, Roe spat out a string of obscenities.

  In his report issued in February 1987, Inspector E.F. Donnelly wrote that Roe displayed “utter contempt for OSHA.” After combing through the Imperial plant, he found six violations, three of them “serious.” (Serious was OSHA’s term for issues that were noteworthy but not deemed immediately life threatening.60) Six months after Donnelly filed his report, OSHA was back at Imperial for a planned follow-up inspection. Investigators spent ninety-seven hours talking to employees and examining injury logs, checking on company safety procedures and policies, observing the way the assembly line and cooker operated, testing fire alarms, and opening and closing safety doors. By the time they had finished, they had uncovered thirty-three health and safety violations, fifteen of them serious, including slippery floors, the lack of first aid stations and clearly posted warnings about hazardous conditions, improperly shielded machines, unlit exit signs, blocked exit doors, and electrical cords lying in pools of water. One employee told the inspector that the plant was “an accident waiting to happen.” This time, OSHA proposed a fine of $6,030. The company settled for $2,560 and agreed to fix the problems. A few months later, another fire broke out at the Moosic plant, causing $6,000 in damages. No one was injured, and it doesn’t appear that OSHA came back to inspect the plant or to follow up on Donnelly’s report.61

  By now, though, Emmett Roe had had enough of Donnelly, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Retail Clerks Union, and the state prying into his business. Over the next few years, he shut down the Pennsylvania plant and moved his food business and as much of the equipment in his factory as he could get on a truck south. Somehow, Roe’s woeful OSHA record of obstruction and safety violations didn’t follow him. Though Donnelly scribbled at the bottom of his report a note about the Hamlet plant and the need to look into it, no one at OSHA’s offices in Pennsylvania or in Washington, D.C., let OSHA officials in North Carolina know that a repeat safety offender had set up shop in their state.62

  Roe didn’t tell anyone either. North Carolina law required all new industrial enterprises to obtain a business license to operate in the state or face a fine. Roe never did register and he was not found out until after the fire. State law also required all new employers with eleven or more employees to register with OSHA and the Department of Labor in Raleigh. After that, the agency put each company into a lottery system. When its number came up, it would receive a surprise inspection at the facility. (Otherwise, a complaint would trigger an inspection, like it did in Moosic.) The chances of getting inspected in North Carolina or anywhere in the United States were not very high, but you never knew when the regulators might knock on your door. When people went looking through the Labor Department’s records after the fire, they couldn’t find any paperwork from Roe, leading them to conclude that he had never even filed the necessary forms with OSHA. Technically, this meant that Roe did not have the authorization to operate a business in North Carolina. That didn’t stop him, though, from churning out cheap chicken products.63

  Hamlet city officials continued to leave Roe alone, even as he moved more of his operations into town. Like so much else about Imperial, the plant owner’s calculated silence only became clear after tragedy struck. Not long after the fire, Hamlet’s tax collector, Susan Furr, dug through the files in her office. She found that the city had no listing for Imperial for personal property or inventory taxes, which accounted for the heavy machinery and other equipment in the plant. Furr went back to 1984 and still could not find a listing or payment for inventory taxes. Richmond County Tax Supervisor Amsey Boyd told a reporter that it was the property owner’s responsibility to list his property for taxes. He said that he had been aware that inventory and personal property for Imperial had not been listed for years and had on a few occasions informed the company of its failure to comply, but no one from Bridges Street had ever replied. It did not seem like Boyd or anyone else from the county clerk’s office or City Hall had followed up on these findings or threatened to take away Imperial’s business license—or even find out if they had one—or threatened to drag the company into court for failure to make payment.64

  The state Department of Insurance reported, again, after the fire, that Imperial never obtained a building permit for the shed it built around the outdoor trash bin and dumpster where Loretta Goodwin and others got trapped during the fire. The door leading to that enclosure was locked from the outside at the time. Of course, this, too, was a violation of state codes.65

  As he flaunted a number of laws without any repercussions, Emmett Roe must have sensed that no one in Raleigh or Richmond County or Hamlet would challenge him. By 1990, his company was one of the largest, if not the largest, private employer in Hamlet, a town that was starved for jobs. Local officials, according to city manager Ron Niland, practiced “benign neglect” when it came to Imperial and other job creators. This disregard continued as Roe ratcheted up production, adding more additions to the plant, starting a second shift, and hiring more people. The neglect continued, even after the small fires broke out at the plant in 1980 and 1983 and another one in 1987.66 No officials came to the site, not even after South Hamlet residents complained about ghastly smells leaking from the factory. No one came when the city manager and others first noticed “cannonball sized” chunks of grease and fat in the city’s water supply and figured out they had originated at Imperial. At one point, the city had to shut off its water supply for a few hours to clean things up. At that point, someone from City Hall came to talk to Roe, though one company official thought they treated the firm with kid gloves.67

  A year before the 1991 fire, an exasperated Ron Niland finally confronted Brad Roe, by then the on-site, everyday manager at the plant, about wastewater problems. The recent college graduate promised to install pre-treatment facilities and put in place a plan to take care of the greasy waste generated by the production of chicken tenders and other chicken products. But he dragged his feet, challenging the city’s water tests, cutting corners, and constantly pleading for more time. Through the first half of 1991, Niland wrote him ever more urgent and threatening letters. He even hauled Roe into City Hall at one point and demanded at a hearing that he show cause as to why officials shouldn’t close down his plant. The result of the encounter was that the city gave Imperial yet another extension to fix things.68 Eventually, Emmett Roe came to town to talk with Niland about the water and waste issues. During a break in the meeting, he leaned in close to the city manager, tapping him on the chest with his index finger. “I won’t lie to you,” the chicken plant owner promised, “but I will prevaricate.” Over the next few weeks, Emmett Roe, along with Brad, Niland recalled, fought “tooth and nail” against making substantive changes to how the plant obtained and disposed of water. Emmett Roe, in particular, Niland concluded, “didn’t want to spend any money.” Eventually, the city gave Imperial thirty days to make the necessary adjustments. At the final hour, the company complied by doing the bare minimum.69

  After the fire, Niland became convinced that Emmett Roe had stonewalled because he hadn’t wanted anyone else to find out about the wells that had been dug in the plant’s maintenance areas and the massive amounts of water that had been stolen over the years. The former city manager still wonders to this day what would have happened if he had gotten into the plant and if the city had followed through and shut Imperial down as it had threatened to do in the fall of 1991.70

  The government agency with the most contact with the Roes in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Typically, Kenneth B
ooker, Charles Blumhardt, Grady Hussey, or another trained food inspector from the agency showed up at Imperial every day. “The . . . food safety inspector made sure the chicken [tenders] and marinated chicken breasts that left the plant were safe for consumers to eat,” said Wayne Brooks, a USDA supervisor in Raleigh, the day after the fire. Looking out for consumers, Booker and Blumhardt—the two in the plant the most—usually started their day with a visit to the Imperial office. After that, they walked past the giant fryer, stuck a head in the blast freezers and coolers, checked the floors in the trim room for mouse and rat droppings, and peeked around the trash bins and compacter for insects. They made sure that workers scrubbed and disinfected the machines at the end of the day and kept rancid meat out of the tenders and fajitas. They noted when workers touched food products without washing their hands after using the bathroom or grabbed chicken that fell to the floor and put it back on the processing room conveyor belt, as some said Brad Roe ordered them to do when the USDA wasn’t there to see them.71

  Starting in 1989, the USDA sent Imperial a stream of notices about flies coming in from the areas near the loading dock and the dumpster. The Roes tried to get the government men off their backs by putting up flytraps and sending “five or six women,” one supervisor recollected, “out there with fly swatters.” But they couldn’t contain the problem manually or cheaply. Flies kept sneaking into the plant from the exits on the southern end of the building because the door there wouldn’t properly close and because workers going out for a smoke or to get something from their cars often left it open. In February 1991, Blumhardt found the “big roll-up door on receiving dock . . . wide open . . . [and] . . . no fly-fan.” In July, inspectors again expressed concerns about the fly problem. Throughout the day, workers went out to the dumpster area to throw away empty chicken boxes and get a little fresh air. On July 2, Booker noted a “critical” deficiency. The door to the loading dock area was again not closing properly, “leaving [a] crack for flies to enter.” “Flies,” he wrote, “are in all departments. . . . A better program needs to be established to address the fly problem.” The next day, Booker came back and found more flies. “Discussed fly problem with Brad Roe,” he reported.

  A couple of days later, Joseph R. Kelly, Imperial’s night manager, laid out the company’s response to the inspectors’ most recent complaints about flies. “Outside door to this area,” he explained in a note to the USDA, “will be locked at all times unless for an emergency.” Over the next few weeks, Imperial built a shed, without a permit, around the trash compacter and dumpster where most of the flies came from. This structure featured, in Kelly’s words, “a door on the inside and outside. Door on inside will be kept closed when not using dumpster and outside door will be kept locked.” From inside the building, this door was an exit door. The USDA, nonetheless, seemed satisfied with Imperial’s plan. As Raleigh News and Observer reporter Steve Riley wrote in his article breaking the news about the flies and the doors, Grady Hussey, a USDA inspector, “signed the report, verifying that corrective action had been taken.” That brought an end to the matter of the flies. As a result, Emmett and Brad Roe avoided what they could least afford—a government shutdown of their chicken tender operations. “The only priority of management,” Department of Labor investigators concluded after the fire, “was production and complying with USDA requirements.”72

  An exit door locked from the outside, however, violated just about every basic workplace safety rule on the books. “Are you kidding me?” Nellie Brown, a certified industrial hygienist and Cornell University professor of industrial and labor relations blurted out after hearing about Imperial’s fly prevention plan. But the meat inspectors said nothing more, at least through official channels. They came and went on most days between July of 1991 and Labor Day of that year, vaguely aware, perhaps, that an exit door was locked, keeping the flies out and the workers in.73

  When asked by Charlotte reporters why USDA inspectors did not object to the locked doors, Wilson Horne, the agency’s Washington-based deputy administrator for inspections, explained, “We’re strictly in there as food safety inspectors.” Horne added that his men never filed reports regarding plant safety, not in Hamlet or anywhere else. “My thoughts are,” he continued, “that a large plant having locked doors per se is not all that unusual. It’s not something our inspectors are trained to look for. Our people are not trained to look for fire hazards.” “We’re terribly sorry about the accident, but it doesn’t fall under our responsibility at all,” Jim Greene, another USDA spokesperson, asserted. “It’s not buck-passing,” he continued, “but our job is to inspect meat and poultry products, and that’s a full-time job itself. . . . We’re not fire marshals, quite frankly. We’re food inspectors, and that’s our primary duty.”74

  Greene and Horne’s logic was, according to Cornell professor Nellie Brown, that “people are expendable; the value is in the product.”75

  Tired of moving from base to base, one unfamiliar town to the next, William Morris left the military in the late 1980s and settled back in Richmond County, where he had grown up decades earlier and gone to high school. “Imperial,” he remarked years later, “was just about the only job around.” He put in an application and got hired to join the plant’s maintenance crew. A few months after he took the job, Emmett Roe, he said, told him to put a latch and padlock on the door leading out to the dumpster. When he finished the job, he remembers walking into the small office across the street from the main entrance to the plant and handing the keys to Roe. They talked for a minute. Roe told him, Morris recounted in an interview twenty years later, that he had to lock the doors to stop his employees from stealing chickens.76

  Like most workplaces, Imperial experienced some theft. Abbie Covington, the town’s mayor at the time of the fire, said that a local restaurant owner once told her that he never bought chicken tenders from the Imperial plant; he just purchased them from one of Roe’s employees. According to police records, officers caught an Imperial worker in March 1991 with $245 worth of boneless chicken breasts. Around that same time, the company fired a couple of other workers for stealing.

  “I’ve heard the different stories that there was people stealing,” a plant official told Department of Labor investigators, “But that, I mean, that’s crazy.” He added, “I know two or three people we caught, and . . . we didn’t prosecute them.” Seven years after the fire, Brad Roe talked to Charlotte Observer reporter Paige Williams and echoed the plant official’s view of things. In the article, Williams stated that Roe said “he did not lock doors to keep employees from stealing chicken.” “I processed 60,000 pounds of chicken a day,” Roe insisted. “If a $30 box of chicken got thrown out that door out of $100,000 produced that day, that doesn’t warrant a problem.” Underscoring Roe’s point, an Imperial supervisor told investigators after the fire that “there wasn’t that much stealing going on there anyway.” In the end, even though Emmett and Brad Roe fretted over the bottom line, they weren’t, it seems, all that concerned about a few tenders going out a side door, not when they were buying frozen chicken breasts by the truckload. What Imperial, a “struggling company,” in Brad Roe’s words, couldn’t let happen, though, was for the USDA to close the plant down because of a fly problem. That would cost them way more than a few boxes of stolen chicken would.77

  Still, when Emmett Roe talked to William Morris about locking the doors, Morris remembers him spitting out a few choice words about stopping his “low-down” employees from thieving. Nothing was said about flies and the USDA. Maybe this was how the plant owner deflected attention away from the company and its actions toward workers. But it also might have said something about how he perceived, or wanted others to perceive, the community surrounding the building. Maybe it said something about how he saw the women on the line and the men unloading the trucks at the factory, and maybe how he imagined others saw them. Decades later, when talking about why the doors were locked, Morris, trying to explain what happened, called Emm
ett Roe a “stone-cold racist.”78

  “Emmett Roe,” Imperial line worker Annette Zimmerman believed, “saw us as a group of niggers.” She remembered a supervisor telling her on her first day on the job, “Don’t ever talk to Emmett Roe. He says you are only good for two things, working his chicken and cleaning his house.” “He thought we would steal,” Zimmerman concluded. “It was prejudice.” “He had that stereotype,” she remarked twenty-plus years after the fire, “but all of us don’t steal.”79

  When the State Bureau of Investigation went to talk to Hamlet Fire Chief David Fuller, a man considered by some around town to be a “good old boy,” about the fire and the blocked exits, he told them, according to several people who were at the meeting, “that he was aware that the doors were locked, and that he knew if Imperial Foods didn’t keep them locked, the employees would ‘steal them blind.’”80

  In later investigations, Fuller denied rumors that Emmett Roe had paid him and his fire crew off with boxes of tenders to leave his factory alone and ignore his company’s disregard for worker safety.81 Later, Fuller also denied rumors that he and other Hamlet firefighters knew about the locked doors or that they had a key to the door near the loading dock, the one that was locked from the outside and sent workers on the morning of the fire scurrying for cover as smoke filled the plant into the nearby cooler with the faulty door. Following the deaths at the plant, Kim Mangus, an Imperial maintenance supervisor, swore in a notarized statement that he had handed over a key to the door to Connie Crowley, one of Fuller’s deputies. The firefighter told him, Mangus remembered, “as long as there were other exits where workers could get out and they had a key, that was all right.” Based on this conversation, Mangus believed, “We’d covered the bases . . . as far as obtaining permission to have the lock on the door.”82