by Bryant Simon
Reporting unsafe conditions to the USDA men must have seemed to Imperial workers like a risky strategy. At the same time, few knew that they could pick up a phone and report violations to unseen OSHA officials (if they got through to the right number). Not many would have trusted that their complaints would go undetected by the Roes. And who could take this risk? Who could risk that Brad Roe, with his fiery temper, might find out that they were the one who had blown the whistle? What they saw inside Imperial every day didn’t inspire much confidence in federal, state, or local oversight.75
Imperial workers weren’t the only ones keeping quiet or worried about choosing between “risking jobs and risking their lives.”76 The changing tenor at OSHA under Reagan muzzled workers everywhere. Ken Silver, a Massachusetts health and safety activist, reported that factory laborers in his state doubted that the agency would address safety problems. “They just don’t feel OSHA can help them any longer,” he said.77 As a result, another layer of silence hung over the Imperial plant and places like it across the country. Saying nothing was the best way to keep a job during a time when finding a job was hard enough and the economic winds were blowing hard in the wrong direction. In some ways, working people cheapened themselves, concluding based on all the information around them that they had a choice between safety and work, and just about everyone chose work.
James Martin occupied the Victorian-era governor’s mansion in Raleigh when the fire broke out at Imperial. A Princeton PhD and former chemistry professor at Davidson College, the Mecklenburg County Republican looked the part of a North Carolina politician just about as much as John Brooks didn’t fit the role. Tall and square-jawed, with a deep voice and a thick mat of black hair, he could smile for the camera and talk to donors. His academic smarts, political experience as a six-term United States congressman, and good looks helped to make him just the second member of his party to hold the state’s highest office since the last days of Reconstruction. Party registration and his opposition to abortion rights and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday aside, Martin did not represent a sharp break from the past. His pro-business, limited-regulation politics overlapped with those of his Democratic predecessor, Jim Hunt, more than they did with those of the state’s other leading Republican at the time, the force behind the anti-communist, evangelically fueled, surging New Right, Senator Jesse Helms.
Both Martin and Hunt believed, as a matter of faith, that job creation and industrial recruitment signaled economic health and benefited society, while taxes, red tape, and regulations cut into corporate profits and held down the economy. “We want jobs,” Martin told a reporter. “Which of those [jobs] don’t you want?” Like Hunt, he saw the point of government as helping businesses succeed and prosper by keeping labor costs down, unions at bay, and the state’s roads as straight, smooth, and far reaching as possible. That way they could deliver affordable everyday goods. A few new prisons and a couple of nationally recognized universities couldn’t hurt matters either.78
Martin reacted to the fire, at first, as a business progressive would. Within hours of the blaze, the governor told a pack of reporters that he wasn’t sure that the state needed more factory inspectors or any other kind of dramatic change to its labor and workplace rules. But Martin had enough of the politician’s gift—that skill that Brooks seemed to lack—to know when to make a quick pivot and bounce away from an unpopular stance. Sensing the gathering outrage at the locked doors and lack of OSHA oversight, Martin quietly shifted his position. When pressed, he pushed blame onto Brooks. If the head of the state’s Department of Labor had done a better job, maybe, the governor suggested, things could have turned out different. At the same time, he distanced the state from the Roes, telling reporters that no one in Raleigh had ever recruited Imperial or offered the chicken processors any special favors to relocate to Hamlet. Knowing that the public wanted to see some changes, within days of the blast, Martin pledged funds for two dozen new factory inspectors, called for the establishment of a state fire inspection division, urged the USDA to cross-train its staff to recognize safety problems while performing their regular duties, and pressed for the establishment of a worker safety hotline that laborers could call anytime, day or night, to anonymously report locked doors, leaking chemicals, and other hazardous conditions. True to his faith in more business and limited regulation, Martin rejected demands from the state AFL-CIO to turn North Carolina’s OSHA program over to the Department of Labor in Washington. He called that “federal intrusion.”79
Still, the fire and the public reaction to it worried the state’s pro-business, anti-regulation forces. Less than a week after firefighters pulled all of those bodies out of the Imperial plant, Courtney Roberts, the director of a Charlotte-based construction industry trade group, expressed his sorrow for the loss of life in Hamlet. He quickly added, though, that he thought that current OSHA standards did the job. “I think there’s going to be an overreaction,” Roberts feared. “Then,” he continued, “there will be new rules that will result in problems for business and industry. . . . That’s inevitable.”80
The inevitable did happen. First, OSHA moved on the Roes’ Georgia operations, closing down the Cumming factory when it found out that employees there had not received fire training and that the plant lacked an automatic fire suppression system and did not have visibly marked fire exits.81 More important, in the spring of 1992 voters in the North Carolina Democratic Party’s primary swept John Brooks out of office and replaced him on the ticket with Harry Payne. On the stump, the six-term, liberal-leaning, well-regarded state representative from New Hanover County chided Brooks for his ineffective, top-heavy managerial style and promised to beef up the state’s Department of Labor.82 After prevailing in the primary and then in the general election, Payne took office ready to seize the moment and press for key workplace safety reforms. In 1992, the North Carolina General Assembly would follow his lead and pass a slate of new laws aimed at making its workplaces safer.
But, by then, most of the reporters had stopped shining a spotlight on the deeper causes of the fire, and they even stopped coming to Hamlet, except for the few who returned sometimes in early September to check in on the anniversary of the fire. The rest of the time the town was just like it was before the hydraulic hose burst and started to spew flammable fluid in every direction. Quiet. Out of the way. Except there was just about no place in Hamlet to work anymore that paid even a dollar above minimum wage. On the ground things really weren’t much better for working people.
7
ENDINGS
Five minutes. That’s how long it would have taken the members of the Dobbins Heights Fire Department to drive a truck with lights flashing and sirens blaring from their station house to the Imperial Food Products plant on Bridges Street in Hamlet. Yet they were never called on the morning of September 3, 1991, leaving some—especially in the black community—to wonder why.
Before Dobbins Heights was Dobbins Heights, it was the North Yard, and for most of the twentieth century this small, almost entirely African American community of less than a thousand residents remained, in administrative terms, an unincorporated section of Richmond County. That meant it didn’t have its own local services or its own direct representatives. While residents paid taxes to Hamlet (sometimes) and Richmond County (more often), they didn’t get much in return. In the middle of the 1960s, a local minister spearheaded the formation of the North Yard Improvement Association, and the group raised money to install streetlights along a couple of its main thoroughfares. Yet when Emmett Roe bought the Imperial plant almost twenty years later, some North Yard streets remained unpaved and potholed. Few had sidewalks. The sewers backed up when it rained, and area residents joked that the gurgling water system remained so faulty and inadequate that two people on the same street couldn’t take a shower at the same time and have enough pressure to rinse off the soap.1
But one of the main reasons that North Yard residents got organized was to deal with fire safety. In the
mid-1970s, community members alleged that if they called the dispatcher in Hamlet, he would ask them for their address, and when he found out where they lived, he would press them to find out if they had insurance or $300 in cash. If they didn’t have of either of these things, or couldn’t convince the person at the other end of the line that they did, the trucks didn’t come their way. The only sure way for North Yard residents to put out a fire, then, was to start their own fire company.2
Two years after the founding of the North Yard Volunteer Fire Company, local community leaders sought annexation by Hamlet. It seemed like the right time. Hamlet was about to enter a growth spurt. Between 1980 and 1990, it would add hundreds of acres of new territory and 1,200 new residents, largely through annexation. But Hamlet officials turned down the request from the North Yard to be part of the city, telling reporters that they couldn’t afford the cost of taking on an economically distressed community. North Yard residents felt sure that race, along with need, figured into their neighbors’ calculations.
Following Hamlet’s rejection, North Yard leaders began to push for incorporation so that the community could become a town with elected leaders, a budget, and municipal services. Around this time, some residents started to call the neighborhood Dobbins Heights, named after Pastor Jim Dobbins, who in the 1930s had owned a big chunk of the area’s land.3
On May 8, 1984, local officials held a referendum on incorporation. The measure passed, though just barely, and only after a recount following the discovery by poll watchers that several corpses had risen from the dead to vote. The shaky start of Dobbins Heights, as it was now officially called, was soon forgotten as the town’s African American mayor and all–African American city council secured state and federal grants to pave streets, lay down sidewalks, fix up and fence in a park, and purchase new fire equipment—fire equipment they were ready to use on the morning of September 3, 1991.4
At 8:24 a.m. on the day of the fire, Captain Calvin White of the Hamlet Fire Department jumped into his truck and raced to the site of the Imperial plant. As he turned down Spear Street, he saw out of the corner of his eye the crown of a woman’s head sticking out from an opening between the wall by the trash compactor and the loading dock. When he made a left onto Bridges Street, he knew right away by looking at the density of the smoke that this was, in his words, “a horrific fire.” He immediately put a mutual aid call into Rockingham, sending out word that he needed every available firefighter in the area to come at once. Somehow, that message never got to Dobbins Heights.5
As soon as Ernest Cannon, the Dobbins Heights fire chief and a Vietnam veteran, got to the station on the morning of September 3, he called over to Hamlet and let them know that his men were ready to help. By then, most of the community’s volunteer firefighters—and that was all there was in Dobbins Heights in 1991—had already heard about the fire. All of them knew someone who worked at the plant. Some, like Johnny Reddick, had family—his wife, Cleo—inside the building.
Stay ready, Hamlet Fire Chief David Fuller, now in charge of the operation, told Cannon, adding that he would call back when he needed help from Dobbins Heights. The phone never rang. Cannon reached out to the Hamlet Fire Department two more times that morning. Finally, he drove over to the Imperial factory. He got the same message in person. Stay ready. We may need you here, Fuller told him, or we may need you to put out a house fire or take care of some other problem in Hamlet while our men are occupied. Stand by.
As Cannon and his men remained on standby, the East Rockingham Fire Department and the Rockingham Fire Department rushed to Bridges Street. Fuller and his men reached out to the Cordova Fire Department, eight and half miles away, because, as the chief later said, the firefighters there had experience with large and tricky fires. The Hamlet Fire Department asked the Northside Fire Department, also eight miles away, to hurry over with its equipment truck that was able to refill the oxygen-filled air packs that firefighters depended on to breathe as they crawled through the smoke-filled building trying to put out the fire and locate missing bodies. Fuller requested additional assistance from Richmond County Emergency Medical Services and rescue squads from Ellerbe and Hoffman. All that day the Dobbins Heights Fire Department remained on standby status.6
Rockingham City firefighter Frankie Moree was one of the first on the scene at Imperial. He was also among the first to enter the building. Without a map of the plant, something he couldn’t believe that Hamlet firefighters didn’t have, the fire suppression team headed for the processing room, but they had to withdraw because of the heat and smoke. They relaunched their attack through the equipment room and, by 10:00 a.m., they had gotten the fire under control. Search and rescue operations started around 8:45 a.m., with the final victim, maintenance man John Gagnon, being pulled out of the building shortly after 12:20 p.m. Thinking back on this nasty and tricky fire, Moree felt certain that the Dobbins Heights volunteers, whom he had worked with a couple of times before on house fires, were “underqualified” to handle something this big and complicated. So, while Moree didn’t think much of David Fuller, his pre-fire planning, or his leadership of the Hamlet Fire Department, he did think he made the right call to keep the Dobbins Heights crew out of the building that morning, though he thought that they could have pitched in with first aid and other relief efforts outside the plant.7
“You can get too much help,” Fuller explained to a local reporter when asked why he didn’t call in the Dobbins Heights Fire Company. Asked another time about why he never picked up the phone, he questioned the qualifications of the firefighters from the nearby town. On yet another occasion, Fuller told reporters that these men should have felt “honored” just to be on standby.8
A few months after the fire, Ernest Cannon put on a suit jacket, crisp white shirt, and thickly knotted tie for an interview with a documentary filmmaker who was working on a project about the Hamlet fire. He looked straight into the camera and read, in verse, his answer to Fuller’s declaration about honor and standby status:
“I’m honored to be unable to save my wife’s life.
I’m honored to be unable to save my cousin’s life.
I’m honored to be unable to save my neighbor’s life.”
“Why do you think you were turned down?” Cannon was asked by the filmmaker.
Cannon took a deep breath before answering. “Well,” he said, “I can’t say.” But then he did say: “Personally, I believe that racial decisions had a lot to do with it. And the town I live in is predominately black . . . the only (one like it) in the area.”9
“We could have saved at least one life,” a “pissed off” Cannon told a journalist who asked him about the fire and his company’s standby status on another occasion. “We could have got some of them doors unlocked. We could have assisted the first responders. . . . They didn’t have enough man power.”10
But his company wasn’t called and, as he explained, to yet another reporter, “It was a racial thing. We are just as qualified as his volunteers.” “I know they’re prejudiced,” Cannon charged, talking about Chief Fuller and some of his men, “Hamlet has always looked at Dobbins Heights that way.”11
Cannon based his suspicions about racial bias, he said, on his familiarity with the Hamlet Fire Department. They had trained his men, and the two companies had worked together on a few fires. But these weren’t his only experiences with his counterparts. A few months before the Imperial explosion, the Dobbins Heights Fire Department, Cannon explained, had purchased new radio equipment. Almost as soon as it was up and running in mid-August, Cannon’s company started to receive daily threats that their station would be blown up and its firefighters attacked. One time, he claimed to have heard someone on the other end of the radio snarl, “Nigger, get off the airwaves.” He was convinced that he recognized the voices. They sounded to him like several Hamlet firefighters he knew.12
Fuller had a different explanation. He scoffed at charges that his department shunned the Dobbins Heights firefighters be
cause they were black. Calvin White, the Hamlet Fire Department captain, was (and is) black; same with Wayne Covington, a Rockingham firefighter, who was on the scene that day. “I had every sex and race involved in the fire and rescue,” Fuller rightly noted. “The fire departments that were called to the scene are also racially mixed. That is obviously not any consideration I would have.” Fuller based his decisions, he said, on competency, not skin color. Dobbins Heights wasn’t called, Fuller insisted, because it did not have “experienced personnel and leadership.” Summing up, Fuller declared, “I was looking for good, seasoned firefighters and their leaders.”13
Hearing Fuller’s explanation didn’t change Cannon’s mind. It just made him madder. He wouldn’t let anyone, he fumed, “slander the reputation of this station.” He insisted that some of the firefighters at the scene were “no better than we are.” No matter what Fuller or Moree said or how many other black firefighters were there that day, he remained convinced that race lay behind the snub. He wasn’t alone in his suspicions or his distrust of those running the Hamlet Fire Department or the town itself.14