Accidents at Explosives Plants Raise Safety-Regulation Issue

After two explosions and a fire killed Walter Buss at an explosives plant in the Santa Clarita Valley, his burned and lacerated body was surrounded by evidence of violations of basic safety principles.

A portable electric heater was in the area where Buss had been mixing and packaging explosive powders, and a spark from it could have caused the initial explosion. The second, fatal blast was fueled by several gallons of flammable liquids that were improperly stored in the work area. And Buss was not wearing a flameproof suit.

Soon after they learned of the March, 1982, accident, inspectors from California’s occupational safety agency, Cal/OSHA, went to the Special Devices Inc. plant east of Newhall. They sought to investigate, much as they would after a fatal accident at any business in California.

Inspectors Powerless

In this case, however, state inspectors found themselves powerless to issue citations or order correction of hazardous conditions that contributed to Buss’ death.

As a Special Devices engineer remarked later, referring to the state inspectors: “We threw them out. . . . They’re not allowed here.”

The inspectors had no authority because Buss was working on a U.S. Defense Department contract. Five years earlier, with virtually no debate or publicity, Cal/OSHA had relinquished its jurisdiction over firms producing explosives and ammunition for the military.

Cal/OSHA stepped aside in 1977 in favor of a Defense Department safety program that involves pre-announced inspections and that relies mainly on the contractors to investigate their own accidents.

As a result, the state provides less safety oversight for thousands of workers in about 90 California explosives plants than it does for workers in less risky jobs.

Earlier this year the situation drew a protest from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which regulates job safety nationwide but has delegated its powers to 21 states, including California.

Federal officials told the state that its hands-off policy toward explosives plants may violate the agreement under which California took over the job of monitoring private industry job sites. Cal/OSHA has agreed to consider restoring its authority over defense explosives manufacturing.

Some Cal/OSHA officials in Southern California long ago urged an end to the exemption, but to no avail.

One of them recently said that leaving job safety in defense explosives plants to the Defense Department, a customer with an interest in getting work done on time, is like “letting the fox guard the chicken coop. . . . I think we’ve got a conflict of interest there.”

California’s policy toward explosives plants is unique, OSHA officials said. Of the 21 states that monitor private industry in place of the federal agency, California is the only one to have exempted defense explosives manufacturing from state regulation. It is also the state with the most explosives plants doing defense work.

State and federal records and interviews with current and former safety officials indicate that the exemption was adopted with little or no study--and with little attention to the accident record at some explosives plants.

Over the years, at least 10 explosives firms have been attracted by cheap land and a dearth of neighbors to the rugged canyons and remote hills of the Santa Clarita Valley.

The oldest company there, Bermite, was founded in the early 1900s by legendary prize fighter James J. (Gentleman Jim) Corbett to supply explosives for gold and silver mines, according to the company. Today, Saugus-based Bermite and several other companies make products such as decoy flares--used on warplanes to lure away enemy heat-seeking missiles--and devices that use small amounts of explosive powder to activate warheads, eject bombs from airplanes and separate stages of missiles and spacecraft.

The largest of the firms is Space Ordnance Systems, which has a plant at Agua Dulce and another in an industrial park of explosives firms east of Newhall. Also at that site are plants of Special Devices and Inflation Systems International Inc., although the latter recently was sold and will move soon.

These four firms normally employ a total of about 750 people, many of them unskilled workers with little education who receive starting pay of $4.35 to $5.35 per hour. They do jobs such as blending explosives by remote control or by hand in bowls or pans, working presses that squeeze explosive powders into flares and soldering wires on small explosive devices.

There are no official injury statistics, but a count by The Times found that at least seven workers have died and at least 25 more have been seriously injured in explosions and fires in these plants since 1972. Two employees of a waste disposal firm also died in an explosion and fire while disposing of SOS wastes at Ft. Irwin Army base in San Bernardino County. This accident count--based on court and Defense Department records, workers’ compensation files, newspaper clippings and interviews--is almost certainly incomplete.

The record is an improvement over that of the 1950s and 1960s, when accidents at Bermite--the only one of these companies then in operation--killed at least 12 workers and hurt at least 40 more. Some workers credit their employers with improving safety over the years.

Reminders of Danger

But recent incidents served as a reminder that many workers clock in daily in the Santa Clarita Valley knowing that they could be carried out with parts of their bodies missing.

In February, Kim Funnell, a 23-year-old SOS employee, lost parts of nine fingers when two pans of explosive powder ignited in his hands.

On the day in March that Funnell walked out of the burn center at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital, Don Strong, 24, another SOS worker, was carried in on a stretcher with burns he had suffered because the machine he ran lacked a device that would have protected him from a fire.

Interviews with employees and company officials and Defense Department records suggest that safety lapses contributed to these accidents and at least three others in the past year. Two men were badly burned in a flash fire at Inflation Systems in December, and two women employees at Bermite received serious burns in May and June.

Officials of the explosives companies are reluctant to talk about these accidents, in some cases because of pending workers’ compensation cases. Those who agreed to interviews said that they are strongly committed to safety and that accidents often result from a failure by workers to follow safety procedures.

Company officials said that, although explosives work is inherently dangerous--”like handling a loaded gun,” one executive said--their industry’s accident record is no worse than that of others.

In some reporting categories that include some explosives plants, accident rates nationally have been lower in certain years than the average for all manufacturing industries, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says. But there is no data specifically on safety at plants such as those in the Santa Clarita Valley that specialize in making explosives for the military. Some of them fall into a “Chemical Preparations” category, which includes companies manufacturing, among other things, lemon oil and caps for toy pistols.

Alan Opel, director of environmental affairs for TransTechnology Corp., SOS’s parent company, said SOS has about four or five explosives-related injuries a year. “I think we’re doing a good job,” he said.

Special Devices President Tom Treinen declined to be interviewed, citing litigation over the Buss death.

The president of Inflation Systems, the smallest of the firms, said the injuries in December were its only serious ones in more than six years of operation.

Executive Comments

Rodney Muse, a vice president at Bermite, said his firm is “sure as hell trying” to protect its employees, adding that Bermite had gone three years without a serious explosives-related injury before the accidents in May and June.

“This product is unforgiving of any kind of mistakes, whether it’s on the employer’s part or the employee’s part,” Muse said.

Probably no amount of vigilance would eliminate the hazards of handling explosive and pyrotechnic, or fire-producing, powders. Some of these compounds are so unstable that the least friction or smallest spark from a fingertip can create a geyser of flame hotter than 5,000 degrees. In November, 1980, for example, SOS worker Robert Blythe was killed when he scraped a mixing pan over stray particles of pyrotechnic powder that had spilled on his work table, other workers said.

Such accidents don’t have to be fatal to destroy lives.

Deadly Accident

Shortly after being hired at SOS in 1972, James Abbatoye almost died in an explosion and fire that killed two co-workers, 19 and 21 years old. The cause of the accident was never conclusively determined, but Cal/OSHA cited the company for numerous safety violations, such as having too much explosive material stored in the work area.

Abbatoye stumbled from the blaze with burns over 70% of his body and with his intestines hanging out from his belly. He shoved them back inside and rode to the hospital in the bed of an El Camino.

Abbatoye, now 37, recalled recently that he was “happy to be walking around” after the massive injuries. But Abbatoye’s burn-scarred legs still “bother me 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t even go to sleep at night, they ache so bad.”

Michael Buss has to live with a bitter memory. By grim coincidence, he was on hand to witness the agonizing death in 1982 of his stepfather, Walter Buss.

Fatal Explosion

Michael Buss worked for a construction firm hired by Special Devices to reconstruct a building that had been wrecked by an explosion five months earlier. On the morning of the fatal accident, as the younger Buss toiled in the hulk of the damaged building, there was a loud explosion in the building 100 feet away, where his stepfather worked. The company said the cause of the explosion was not determined; a county fire inspector said a spark from the space heater probably set it off.

Michael Buss recalls running to the doorway and seeing his stepfather on the floor calling for help, flames covering his back. As Michael started inside, he was hurled backward through the air by a second explosion. Walter Buss was dead at the scene; Michael was hospitalized with a fractured vertebra.

Since Cal/OSHA largely abandoned its protective role, the job of monitoring conditions that might lead to such accidents has been left to a branch of the Defense Department called Defense Contract Administration Services. It runs a nationwide safety program for contractors that defense officials acknowledge was set up not to monitor worker safety, but primarily to protect government quality-control personnel stationed at plants and equipment loaned to contractors.

Defense Department officials did not ask California to exempt explosives contractors from state supervision. There is no record that the Defense Department was even consulted about the move beforehand.

The waiver was suggested by a Newport Beach defense contractor in a brief letter to Cal/OSHA’s rule-making panel, the Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board, in December, 1976. The company, Ford Aerospace and Communications Corp., said the exemption would eliminate “possible conflicts” between state and Defense Department explosives safety rules. The letter did not identify these conflicts.

Request Endorsed

Nevertheless, the request was endorsed by Cal/OSHA’s enforcement branch, the Division of Occupational Safety and Health, and was adopted without discussion by the standards board at a meeting on July 28, 1977.

The exemption has not stopped Cal/OSHA from inspecting offices, warehouses and other non-manufacturing areas of explosives plants. Nor does it apply to manufacturing for non-military customers. But because many explosives firms are engaged almost exclusively in defense work, the exemption has removed the most hazardous areas of many of these plants from Cal/OSHA’s rules and enforcement activities.

State officials did not find out how many job sites would be affected before relinquishing their power, according to John Bobis, an engineer for the standards board at the time. But Bobis, now the board’s principal safety engineer, said he “would be surprised” if the waiver affected more than 10 California employers.

Many Plants

In fact, about 90 California firms, most in the southern part of the state, make explosives and ammunition under defense contracts and thus are affected, according to the Defense Department. Federal officials said California has about one-fourth of all such plants in the country.

No justification for the change was offered at the meeting at which it was adopted, a tape recording of the session shows. But some Cal/OSHA officials recently cited the Defense Department’s long experience with explosives as evidence of its ability to run an effective safety program. Bobis said in an interview that state officials wanted to be sure worker protection “would not diminish. . . . which in our opinion it did not.”

Indeed, some features of the defense safety program suggest a high level of surveillance. Companies are supposed to obey a detailed manual of explosives safety rules, and inspections of plants are scheduled four times per year. The program has two inspectors based in Van Nuys, with responsibility for about 30 area explosives plants.

Manpower Problems

Cal/OSHA has suffered from manpower problems that critics say blunt its effectiveness, and with 200 inspectors to monitor job sites statewide--last year they visited 13,000--it probably could not inspect plants as frequently as the Defense Department.

But the Defense Department and state procedures differ in several important ways.

Federal safety visits are announced well in advance, eliminating the element of surprise that might help uncover unsafe practices. Cal/OSHA inspectors make surprise visits.

In addition, the state investigates accidents and orders safety improvements when violations are noted. Cal/OSHA can impose fines up to $2,000 for a single violation and up to $20,000 for a serious violation that is willful or repeated, although the penalties usually are much lower.

No Provision for Fines

The federal program leaves it up to the contractors to investigate the cause of accidents. Corrective actions, if any are taken, are decided by the contractors or negotiated with the defense safety officials. There is no provision for fines.

Penelope Fisher, a Defense Department inspector based in Van Nuys, said the federal program serves “as a conduit” for accident information the contractor provides. She said “it’s not our place” to do the investigation, “and we can’t . . . question everything they do.”

Some observers also have suggested that the pressure on the military to restrain costs and keep deliveries on schedule may tempt the Defense Department to be less safety conscious.

“In a way, it’s against their self-interest” to stress safety too much, said Joseph Philipson, a Pasadena chemist who has been a safety consultant for California explosives firms.

The Pentagon is “under the gun now because things are costing too much,” Philipson said. “So what do they gain, from their point of view, from raising the standards of all these companies?”

Conflict Denied

Federal officials deny that such a conflict exists. Because accidents can stall production and raise costs, they say, safety and economy go hand in hand.

Records for the Santa Clarita Valley plants show that the defense inspectors have become increasingly critical of safety conditions in the plants over the past two years. They have cited some contractors for basic safety problems, such as having too much explosive material stored or processed at one location and failing to have workers wear adequate protective footwear to keep them from giving off static electricity.

But a review of the records also raises questions about the federal program’s thoroughness and its reliance on contractors to investigate their own accidents.

In October, 1981, an explosion rocked an unoccupied production building at Special Devices, according to interviews and county fire records. There is no description of the accident in Defense Department reports, including one based on a quarterly safety survey conducted a few weeks later. In fact, the January, 1982, survey report said “no discrepancies were noted” in the production building that had been wrecked by the blast.

Mistake Unexplained

Defense Department safety officials said recently that they cannot explain the mistake. They speculated that the inspector may have inadvertently used the number of the wrecked building to identify an undamaged one in his report.

Although the federal officials say it is their policy to make contractors file accident reports, their files, which were provided under the Freedom of Information Act, contain no reports on several other incidents.

In one incident last year at SOS, a sheet-metal contractor repairing damage from a previous explosion fractured a heel and sprained both wrists when he fell off a ladder. The contractor, Cecil Hill, said he was knocked from the ladder by an explosion when a spark from his welding torch ignited explosive residue in a pan left in the area.

Hill’s account suggests that SOS may have violated a Defense Department rule that thorough cleaning be done “before repairs are started in an explosive location.” Yet the files do not mention this incident either.

No Checks

When contractors do file accident reports, federal inspectors make no effort to check their account of events, as Cal/OSHA inspectors do.

Several witnesses and victims of explosions or fires said in interviews that their companies’ descriptions of events contained inaccuracies or omitted pertinent facts. These workers said federal inspectors did not contact them to hear their side.

“They don’t want to dig in,” complained Funnell, who said the SOS report of the accident there this year in which he lost parts of his hands inaccurately summarized his version of the incident. “They’re just getting it from the employer.”

Cal/OSHA’s decision to leave worker safety to the Defense Department has troubled some of the agency’s field inspectors in Southern California for years.

After the death of Walter Buss in 1982, three Cal/OSHA field officers in Southern California fired off memos to agency higher-ups in San Francisco urging that their full authority over explosives plants be restored.

Inspection Cut Short

They were angry because a visit by two state inspectors had been cut short when they went to the Special Devices plant and learned of safety lapses such as the electrical heater and flammable liquids in the work area.

A company vice president told the state inspectors that Buss was working on a military contract and “that they were not necessary here,” the company’s test engineer, Herbert Diot, said during pretrial testimony in a lawsuit filed by the Buss family.

Jurisdiction over the matter fell to a Defense Department inspector. Two days after the accident, he was quoted in a local newspaper as saying, “I did not find any safety violations,” although a report he wrote later to defense officials mentioned the “unauthorized” electric heater.

Ed Grimes, a Cal/OSHA district supervisor in Van Nuys, complained in one of the memos that state inspectors had been unable to issue citations after the Buss death or a previous fatality at Special Devices even though “there were obvious safety violations” both times.

“The employees in the explosive industry should be afforded the on-the-job protection that other employees are afforded by Cal/OSHA,” Grimes argued. Their employers, he said, “should be subject to the same punitive action as other employers for not providing a . . . safe place for employees to work.”

Question on Monitoring

In another memo, Dick Drew, Cal/OSHA’s district manager in Ventura, asked his superiors “whether it is really in the best interest of California’s explosive manufacturing workers to permit the ‘customer’ (U.S. Department of Defense) to have primary control over occupational safety and health.” Drew was the official who compared the situation to letting the fox guard the chicken coop.

The 1982 protest by field officers “died somewhere along the vine,” said Phil Krohn, Cal/OSHA’s regional manager in Van Nuys. The issue was revived when two employees at Inflation Systems were burned in December. Cal/OSHA officials again said they could not investigate because the men were working on a defense contract.

A Defense Department official then took the unusual step of reporting the case to federal OSHA. It dispatched an inspector and issued citations to Inflation Systems for basic safety violations.

Some OSHA officials said they were unaware of California’s exemption for explosives plants until that time--even though it had been on the books more than six years.

Exemption Questioned

Federal OSHA officials in San Francisco then questioned the exemption in light of the agreement under which the federal job safety agency delegated its powers to the state. That agreement requires that Cal/OSHA’s program be “at least as effective as” federal OSHA’s.

“We cannot afford to just not give protection to people in those areas,” said Gabe Gillotti, an assistant regional administrator with OSHA in San Francisco, referring to the explosives plant workers.

In March, OSHA asked state officials to re-establish jurisdiction over the explosives manufacturers. In response, Cal/OSHA’s enforcement branch in April petitioned the standards board to eliminate the exemption except in cases when there would be a problem with security clearance. In such rare instances, it was proposed, the inspection would be carried out by federal OSHA.

It appears, however, that the exemption will survive at least well into next year. A standards board official said the proposed change is not scheduled for consideration until the panel’s January meeting. Under current rules, he said, a public hearing and comment period--a process that takes months--is required before a rule change.

The Santa Clarita Valley explosives workers, for the most part, are not the well-paid, highly trained specialists one might associate with exotic chemicals and hazardous work.

Many are high school dropouts drawn to explosives work because the starting pay is above the minimum wage.

But the pay “doesn’t even begin to compensate for the risk,” said John Bullock, 35, a former SOS supervisor who was laid off in April and went to work for an electrical contractor.

Although the plants have some veteran employees, they are a revolving door for other unskilled workers in northern Los Angeles County. A memo on file with the California Department of Health Services in Los Angeles says that in 1983, a year in which there were about 400 jobs at SOS’ two plants, the firm issued 2,000 W-2 forms.

The high turnover stems not only from modest pay, but also from the unsteadiness of the work. Workers sometimes are laid off when contracts are completed or when equipment is damaged in accidents. Other workers become fearful and quit after serious accidents, employees and officials say.

Problem of Inexperience

The presence of green recruits represents a safety problem in itself, according to some current and former employees.

“They’d take people right off the street and put them in the blend bay,” the area where explosive powders are mixed, said former SOS employee Bob Waller, 23. He quit in March after two years with the company.

“You just can’t take somebody off the street, a hamburger flipper or something like that . . . and expect them to know what they’re doing,” said Mike Fee, 38, a former supervisor at SOS. “You can’t make a mistake with explosives.”

When workers are injured, they continue to receive a portion of their salaries from the state’s no-fault workers’ compensation system.

That system also shelters employers from damage suits. As a result, injured workers or their families usually are unable to win financial help through the courts.

On occasion, injured workers or their heirs--as in the Buss case--have sued parties other than their employers, such as suppliers of protective clothing or manufacturers of the machinery they were using. A small settlement usually is the best they do.

Improvements Cited

Although many workers complain about unsafe conditions, some also say conditions have improved with time. One worker at SOS said “the day doesn’t go by that you don’t see” company safety officers nosing about and admonishing workers who do things unsafely.

Explosives plant officials say they have written, step-by-step procedures for each hazardous operation. They say that, although workers may be inexperienced, they receive a safety orientation and are not allowed to waver from the procedures without permission, even if they think they know how to do a job faster or better.

“Nothing is supposed to go in this plant without a signed-off, written safety procedure,” SOS’s Opel said.

Opel said accidents frequently are the result of unauthorized shortcuts by workers. Explosives work “is like handling a loaded gun and people realize that there’s a risk associated with it,” he said.

But occasionally, he said, “familiarity breeds contempt” and “the guy deviates from the operating standard and gets hurt.”

Safety Deficiencies

Some injured workers no doubt have been victims of their own mistakes. But in other cases, safety deficiencies at the companies contributed to injuries, public records and interviews show.

Don Strong was burned at SOS while working on a machine that co-workers said lacked a safety device that would have prevented his injuries. Richard Jensen burned his hands and eyes in an accident at Inflation Systems after he was improperly instructed on how to hand-mix explosive powders. And the fire at SOS that cost Kim Funnell part of his hands may have been caused by static electricity that proper protective footwear could have prevented. (See accompanying articles.)

Not all of those hurt at these plants were lulled by the belief it could never happen to them, and not all are particularly bitter.

Dale Vastbinder, for example, talks as if he saw his work as a form of Russian roulette.

Vastbinder, an explosives blender, lost his left thumb and index finger and his eardrums were shattered in an explosion at SOS in November, 1983.

Hand Like ‘Hamburger’

The blast occurred as Vastbinder was blending explosives in a mixing bowl that he tended with one hand extended around the side of a safety shield. The injured hand looked like “a pound of hamburger,” he said, but the other was intact.

Vastbinder saved the other hand by keeping it in back of the shield. He said he made a point to “never have more than one hand behind there at a time.”

Vastbinder, 33, says he is pleased with how things have worked out. After leaving the hospital, he returned to SOS, only to be fired less than a month later. Vastbinder said he was told that he had engaged in an unsafe practice but he believes he was fired as retaliation for filing a workers’ compensation claim.

He said he went back to school and recently got a good job with an electronics firm.

Vastbinder, who had worked at the explosives plant nearly four years when he got hurt, said he was earning $10.60 an hour and might never have quit.

The injury “was a warning, I guess,” Vastbinder said. “Get out now before I die.”

EXPLOSIVES PLANTS 1) Bermite: About 220 employees at 1,100-acre complex in Saugus . . . Located there more than 80 years . . . Major supplier of decoy flares--shot out of fighter planes to draw away an enemy’s heat-seeking missiles--and other components of weapons systems . . . About $20 million in annual sales . . . Purchased in 1967 by the Whittaker Corp., a Los Angeles-based conglomerate.

2) Space Ordnance Systems: Up to 400 workers at two Santa Clarita Valley plants . . . Makes decoy flares and other products, such as explosive bolts that separate missile stages and eject pilots from stricken planes . . . Also makes about 150 Space Shuttle components . . . $23 million in sales during its last fiscal year . . . A division of TransTechnology Corp. of Sherman Oaks.

3) Special Devices, Inc.: About 120 employees on 300-acre tract east of Newhall . . . Makes explosive devices . . . Leases production sites to several similar firms on the property . . . Tenants include SOS’ Sand Canyon plant . . . Privately held company that does not disclose sales figures.

4) Inflation Systems International, Inc: Another tenant at Special Devices’ complex . . . Only six to a dozen workers . . . Products include explosive mix for impulse cartridges--devices that use small explosions to, among other things, eject flares or bombs from airplanes . . . Privately held company recently acquired by OEA Inc. of Denver, which said it will move the company to Colorado.