SAFETY FLAWS SURROUNDING THREE ACCIDENTS : DON STRONG

Don Strong operated a press used to make military decoy flares at the Space Ordnance Systems Mint Canyon plant in Agua Dulce. He had just started his shift on March 13 when he felt “like I got hit in the face with a blowtorch.”

Three flares had ignited in his hands. The 24-year-old worker suffered second and third degree burns.

He would not have been burned if the machine he was operating had been equipped with a certain safety device.

Immediately after the accident, according to current and former SOS employees, the company put the device on the machine. In a nearly identical fire a week later, the press operator was not injured because the safety device kept her away from the flames.

A flare press squeezes pyrotechnic powder into decoy flares, rectangular objects several inches long that burn hotter than 3,500 degrees to draw heat seeking-missiles away from fighter planes.

The press operator pours magnesium and teflon powder into several flare-shaped molds on the machine, closes a heavy safety door and pushes a button to activate the rams and anvils that compact the powder. Once the proper pressure is applied for the right amount of time, the rams lift up, the anvils push the flares from molds and the operator opens the door to remove the flares by hand.

Strong had just reached in to pick up a flare when it went off, setting off two others he was holding.

Bob Waller, an ex-SOS employee who had operated the press on an earlier shift, and John Bullock, Waller’s supervisor, said in interviews that Waller had complained that day that the press was making strange noises. They said Waller resumed work after a maintenance man found nothing wrong with it.

Immediately after Strong was injured, Bullock and Waller said, a delay device was installed on the press to hold the protective door shut for several seconds after the end of the pressing cycle. During that brief interval, SOS officials acknowledge, there is a risk that a flare will ignite due to friction from the moving steel parts or because of internal stresses in the tightly compacted powder.

When another flare went off in the same press a week after Strong got hurt, Bullock and Waller said, the operator this time was waiting for the safety device to release the door. As a result, he was not hurt.

Only after the second fire, Bullock said, did company officials dismantle the press to see what was wrong. They discovered a crack in a steel plate and concluded that specks of powder had settled in it and were ignited by friction, setting off the flares.

Bob Orosco, a former SOS supervisor who left the company in 1979, said in an interview that the plant’s flare presses were equipped with the delay devices at the time of his departure.

Alan Opel, director of environmental affairs for TransTechnology Corp., SOS’s parent company, declined to discuss the accident in detail but said the delay device might have been removed from the press. Opel said the company may have believed the device was not needed because no press fires had been reported with the model of flare that Strong was making.

Strong, a Palmdale resident, needed skin grafts but has made an excellent recovery. While receiving $224 a week as worker’s compensation, he is studying phonograph record production.

In a state claim that SOS is contesting, he has alleged “serious and willful misconduct” by the company. A successful claim would require SOS to pay him a 50% higher disability award.