Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
So, here's what I want you to hear.
It was March 25th, 1911. It's a Saturday. And at about 4:45 in the afternoon, people walking through this very park looked up and saw black smoke billowing into the sky. A fire had started in that building.
And inside that building on the top three floors, deadly flames leapt from a bin to the oily floors and from the floors to the walls sweeping across workrooms and trapping the workers, fighting for their lives. Women, girls really, some as young as 14, raced to escape, but the exit doors were locked.
It was a quarter hour until quitting time on March 25th, 1911 at the Triangle Waste Company when a passerby saw smoke billowing from the factory. The company occupied the top three floors of the ten-story Ash Building in the heart of Manhattan. Triangle was the only occupant still at the office late on a Saturday. That was no surprise. It was an awful place to work.
The Triangle Waist Company manufactured shirtwaists, a staple among pre-voting American women for over 100 years. You would know a shirtwaist if you saw one. It's the puffy armed blouse type thing that buttons in the front. Whether you were being tied to railroad tracks or being burned at the stake, it was the perfect fit for every occasion back then.
The shirtwaists were manufactured in a sweatshop by 500 young women and teenagers, primarily recent immigrants of Italian, Jewish, German, and Russian descent. They often worked up to 70 hours per week in less than suitable conditions and earned less than the living wage. Usually undocumented, in an alien environment, they had no other choice. Hundreds of these workers were in the building that Saturday when it caught fire. A scrap bin underneath a cutting table on the eighth floor was the ignition point.
most likely from a discarded cigarette butt or match. The employees on the eighth floor headed for the elevator and stairwells as soon as they saw the smoke. A few men tried to extinguish the flames with buckets of water, but failed. The fire quickly spread from the scrap bin to the hundreds of pounds of cloth on the factory's surrounding tables, floors, and walls. There was no alarm or sprinkler system in place, and no working telephone to alert the floors above.
When the 10th floor became aware of the fire, the stairs descending to Green Street were already congested with flames. So instead, the workers, including Triangle's executives, raced to the rooftop and climbed across a ladder to a neighboring building owned by New York University, where a law professor realized the emergency and helped the shirtwaist workers escape to safety.
Those on the ninth floor weren't as fortunate. One was obstructed by fire, and the door to the other one was kept locked to prevent workers from smuggling products. A foreman would unlatch the door at the end of the day after checking the women's pocketbooks and purses. When the fire started, that foreman had hurried out of the building with the keys.
The 9th floor's other options for exit were just as cursed. The fire escape seemed promising, until it buckled under the heat and the weight of fleeing workers, sending 20 of them tumbling to an asphalt death 8 stories below. As for the elevator, it never made it above the 8th floor, despite the incessant buzzing. The New York Times described the scene, quote, "...time after time, they saw the cars approach, only to be filled at the 8th and go down again."
Within minutes, the flames were rising from the ground of the ninth floor. A decision had to be made. Some of the girls scaled the elevator cables down to the bottom. Others jumped into the shaft, landing on top of the elevator car, applying so much weight that it sank to the bottom and became warped and immobile. Those that remained on the ninth floor inched closer to the windows. Below, they could see the fire department had arrived by horse and buggy,
Their ladders were extended. Unfortunately, their ladders were two stories too short. Nor could their fire hoses reach the top floors. So, to avoid burning alive, some of the Triangle Waste employees chose to jump. Sometimes alone, sometimes in groups holding hands, sometimes with the ends of their hair on fire. Each sickening thud spooked the fire department's horses.
The falling bodies tore through the life nets that had been deployed. As the New York Times described, they were crushed into a shapeless mass on the concrete. One 13-year-old girl reportedly hung for three minutes by her fingertips to a windowsill until, quote, a tongue of flame licked at her fingers and she dropped to death. Silhouette after silhouette appeared in the window with the backdrop of a raging inferno. A man was seen hugging a woman, kissing her and then throwing her out before diving out himself.
This somewhat romantic scene was reenacted in a 1979 made-for-TV movie about the event. It won an Emmy for outstanding achievement in hairstyling. 62 employees of the Triangle Waste Company jumped to their deaths. Piles of bodies lay in puddles of water for hours as the emergency responders fought the fire. A few of those unrecognizable bodies were still gasping for breath. "It's the worst thing I ever saw," said one old policeman.
The fire was extinguished around 5:15 PM, about 30 minutes after it started. The top three floors of the Ash Building were torched. Inside, rescue workers found 84 bodies burned beyond recognition. Some of them melted together in an embrace. In total, there were 146 deaths. Using a pulley system, it took several hours to lower the bodies to the ground.
They were lined up on the street before being transported to a temporary morgue where they were identified using their jewelry, paychecks, and teeth if they could be identified at all.
The scene was more than Coroner Holzhauser could stand, the Times reported. He was sobbing like a child. "And only one miserable little fire escape," he said. "I shall proceed against the building department, along with the others. They are guilty as any. They haven't been insistent enough. And these poor girls who were carried up in the elevator to work in the morning, now, they come down on the end of a rope." New York City's building department was responsible for inspecting the building and was subject to a sizable portion of the public's outrage.
poorly anchored fire escapes, locked doors. How could they let this happen? The district attorney called for an investigation to find out. In its defense, the building department claimed it was seriously understaffed and underfunded and did not have the time or resources to inspect anything other than new construction. The building department sided with the faction, which placed the responsibility for the fire on the factory owner's greed. Max Blank and Isaac Harris owned the Triangle Waste Company.
Russian-born immigrants who moved to America and became the Shirtwaist Kings. Blankenhuis made millions on the backs of undocumented labor. Some workers claimed the owners locked the doors not because of employee thievery, but because they wanted to keep out the labor union organizers, who were always trying to ruin their party. After all, the Shirtwaist Kings did have a history of doing these types of things.
For example, during the garment workers' strike in 1909, a couple of years before the fire, Blankenhuis paid cops to arrest the demonstrators on flimsy charges and hired "prostitutes" to physically assault the striking employees. The Triangle owners were also notoriously cheap. The fire at the factory spread so quickly because the company had not paid to have the literal ton of scraps hauled away. On second thought, maybe those scraps were left in place for a reason.
The timing of the fire was highly suspicious. Shirtwaist had recently fallen out of fashion. Perhaps Blank and Harris set their own factory on fire to wash their hands of a dying product and collect the insurance proceeds. It's not like they hadn't done it four times before.
The Triangle factory burned twice in 1902. Blank and Harris's other factory burned in 1907 and again in 1910. Still, after four fires, the owners refused to install a sprinkler system. They always kept their options open, just in case they had to do it again. That self-arsen theory was soon ruled out as the cause of the deadly 1911 fire. Even Max Blank and Isaac Harris had the decency to burn their own factories when they were empty.
Investigators determined that the fire was likely an accident, but the deaths could have been prevented if the doors had not been locked. On April 11th, 1911, a grand jury indicted Isaac Harris and Max Blank on seven counts of manslaughter in the first and second degree. That December, they were both found not guilty. Blank and Harris' defense team destroyed the credibility of witness testimony by making them repeat their stories numerous times and then pointing out how it sounded rehearsed.
After the verdict, one juror, Victor Steinman, declared, "I believe that the door was locked at the time of the fire, but we couldn't find them guilty unless we believed they knew the door was locked." Although they dodged prison time, Max Blank and Isaac Harris were later found liable for the wrongful deaths in a civil suit. The plaintiffs were awarded $75 per life lost because of the owners' negligent actions.
Triangle's insurance company paid Blank and Harris $400 per casualty, meaning the shirtwaist kings pocketed $60,000 in profits from the tragedy. Two years later in 1913, Max Blank was again arrested for locking the door during working hours at one of his factories. An apologetic judge fined him $20 and then he went about his day.
But by 1918, the Triangle Waste Company was no more. The Shirtwaist Kings ended their partnership and moved on to other endeavors. Most New Yorkers felt that justice had not been served in any way.
But reformers did not want the deaths of 146 garment workers to be in vain. The shirtwaist factory fire became a rallying cry for organized labor. Under pressure from activists, the New York state legislature created the Factory Investigating Commission, which led to the adoption of 36 new safety laws in the state, which are still in place today. As I look at these shirtwaists, I feel sorrow.
But mostly I feel indignation at the injustice that those women had to jump to their death when they could have been saved. And those women were part of a movement of garment workers in this city that we want to pay tribute to today, who mobilized at the turn of the century to fight for their rights, to demand a decent wage, to support their families,
a safe workplace, an end to child labor and acceptable work hours. These women change the face of this city and our nation by demanding the type of dignity that goes by one name: union.
Here's one of them.
A fire at a chicken processing plant in North Carolina reveals a tragic case of capitalistic inhumanity on this episode of Swindled.
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In the state of North Carolina, deep in railroad country, lies the little town of Hamlet, and it's a place most dear to me. Just a southern town that's sleepy, and what outsiders would call the little town of Hamlet, doesn't even have a mall.
Hamlet, North Carolina used to be a bustling transportation hub. In the early 1900s, the Seaboard Airline Railroad's main line connected in the small town of 7000, about 70 miles southeast of Charlotte. There were plenty of entertainment options for visitors and plenty of steady jobs for the locals, even those who lived on the other side of the tracks.
In the 1950s, Hamlet's jobs started to disappear, however. In conjunction with a nearly completed interstate highway system, the burgeoning popularity and affordability of air travel rendered Hamlet's train station practically obsolete. The following decades of double-digit inflation wreaked havoc on the all-American city. By 1980, the busiest building in downtown Hamlet was the soup kitchen, followed by the shelter for battered women.
One of the many casualties of the economic downturn was a Mellow Buttercup ice cream factory on Bridges Street. The North Carolina-based manufacturer shuttered its 33,000 square foot facility in Hamlet in 1977. It sat dormant for three years until a businessman from Pennsylvania purchased it for $137,000 in September 1980.
Emmett J. Rowe had been in the chicken processing business for 30 years. In the 70s, he had purchased a frozen food factory in Moosick, Pennsylvania, where he had worked for two decades as an executive and renamed it Imperial Food Products. Rowe tripled Imperial's workforce in a few short years to keep up with the ever-growing demand for chicken.
Imperial Food Products was what you call a further processing plant. It wasn't a slaughterhouse. Instead, Emmett Rowe would purchase dead, frozen chickens from suppliers and then have his employees process them into retail-ready products like tenders, legs, and breasts, which were then sold to grocery stores and restaurants like Long John Silver's. By the late 1970s, chicken was getting cheaper.
Man had so successfully dominated the species that it could chemically inflate its flesh and then butcher and sell it as cute bite-sized nugget shapes. Meanwhile, everything else was getting more expensive. Competition in the industry was fierce. So Emmett Rowe began exploring ways to cut costs and ramp up production. Ultimately, he decided to move Imperial Food Products out of Pennsylvania.
The ice cream factory in Hamlet, North Carolina was a perfect landing spot for several reasons. For one, it was closer to suppliers. This meant cheaper delivery fees and a quicker turnaround. Energy was also less expensive in the South, and the climate was warmer, so Imperial would use less of it, cutting costs in multiple ways. But the biggest money saver, and thus North Carolina's most attractive feature for Emmett Rowe, was the labor market. It was cheap.
North Carolina prided itself on being business friendly. According to Brian Simon, who authored a fantastic book about the Hamlet Fire called "The Hamlet Fire," the state featured the lowest average hourly wage in the entire nation.
It had the lowest cost for workers' compensation insurance. And best of all, in Roe's opinion, the workers couldn't do anything to change it. There were no unions. Emmett Roe could not stand working with the unions in Pennsylvania. And lawmakers in North Carolina had just passed anti-union legislation. He could not relocate Imperial fast enough. But if Emmett Roe was excited to be in Hamlet, North Carolina, he had a funny way of showing it.
There was no ribbon cutting ceremony, no job fair, no commercials, no classified ads, not even a sign above the factory's front door. No, Emmett Rowan Imperial Food Products snuck into town like a phantom. He didn't register for a business license or apply for permits when he renovated the factory and almost doubled the floor size. The owner of Hamlet's newest, largest employer never introduced himself to the mayor or city council.
The only people in Hamlet who interacted with Emmett Rowe were the local job agencies who supplied his labor. It was like a hushed clothes place. I guess a lot of big pie for men, but a lot of money was really operating the plant. It was a shame because the community would have welcomed them warmly. By 1990, the unemployment rate in Hamlet was almost triple the national rate.
Imperial Food Products was one of the few jobs in town, especially for undereducated single mothers, many of whom talked to a filmmaker named Robert Cotter in 1994 for a film called Hamlet, Out of the Ashes. I went to the unemployment office. The first job I got was at Imperial. I really didn't have, you know, skills. I couldn't stand the smell for one thing, that fresh chicken. So that made me sick on the stomach. And the smell, that horrible smell was just...
They say if you applied for a job at Imperial in the morning, you could be working the late shift that same day. Even if you didn't have a ride, the factory was within walking distance from the Larry Hubbard projects. Another reason to never be late.
On your first day, you'd be assigned a position and given a blue smock. Sorry, not given. The cost of the required uniform would actually come out of your first paycheck. And you had to clean it yourself, at home. By the end of your first shift, your hands would be numb from the frozen chicken. That sour smell of mass death permeating every pore of your being.
The next day you would definitely wear a second pair of socks. If you're going to be standing in frozen chicken gunk all day long, you might as well be able to feel your feet. Unless you were assigned to the processing room near the fryer. In that case, good luck. There was nothing you could do to escape the heat.
It would be so hot you could hardly stand it. A former employee told the New York Times. There were no windows, no fans, and the meat could be moldy and green. And the supervisors would say just take that part off and throw it away and keep the rest. In a few weeks, your mind will be on autopilot from the mindless repetition. Boning and packing. Boning and packing. Boning and packing. You'll get careless and slip in a puddle of cold meat water on the floor.
It'll hurt, but you'll play it off, knowing you are one missed shift away from the soup kitchen. Your supervisor will take note, don't worry. There was a policy at Imperial Food Products. Employees were only allowed to fall on the job so many times before being terminated. There were so many stupid rules like that. Supervisors would use stopwatches to time your bathroom breaks. Time was money. They were more concerned about profit because...
If a piece of chicken fell on the floor, they'd tell you, "Pick that damn chicken up." Your bosses are primarily members of the Rowe family. Emmett was the top guy. Former Navy. Refused to interact with anyone below him on a personal level. Sometimes you could hear him shouting in the annex building across the street from the factory. That's where Emmett spent most of his time. You'd interact more with Brad Rowe, Emmett's 28-year-old son. Brad was the plant operations manager when he could be a dick.
Under him were supervisors who could be even more belligerent. You would hear them screaming at you to work faster while doling out insults about your race and your weight. The supervisors, I guess they had a job to do, but, you know, it wasn't nice. In a short time on the job, you will discover that the equipment, like everything else at Imperial Food Products, was cheap.
However, you will find yourself growing quite fond of the pieces of junk because they would break quite often resulting in frequent unscheduled breaks. It's the little things because it sure wasn't the money. $4.90 an hour is what you will be paid for sacrificing your time and body. You will be working full time and barely getting by and it is your only option.
You have mouths to feed, so you bite your own tongue, and you grit, and you bear it. Because we was working like slaves for a little bit of money, little or nothing.
We had to be locked up for a little bit or nothing because we had to provide for our families. After a few years working at Imperial, your hands might start tingling. You might feel a little pinch in your wrist every time you bag six ounces, every time you box 45 bags. You physically cannot perform the duties of the job any longer. So you decide to tell your boss.
He blows it off. He tells you that the endless, repetitive nature of your injury has nothing to do with Imperial Food Products. Must have hurt yourself crocheting or shooting dice with all that free time you have. Eventually, you have to quit. Without assistance from the employer who squeezed every drop of profit from your broken body, you and your family have to survive on disability checks from now on. Just another worn out cog, subsidized by taxpayers in a business friendly state.
and another young body will be lined up to take your place on the line before you can even clean out your locker. It seems like you were in those single-socked shoes just yesterday, seeing your future on the face of an old-timer you passed in the hallway on the way to start your first shift in that windowless room. Support for Swindled comes from Simply Safe.
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We worked Saturday.
And it did start that Saturday. And then when we left, they had the mechanics in there working on it. When we came back in that Tuesday morning, we was off that Monday. When we came back in that Tuesday morning, they was working on it then. And when you walked in the front door, you could smell the gas then. It was so loud until it burned your eyes. You know, you smell the smoke.
The smoke, you smell the gas fumes. If they don't get a new brawling hand, they gonna kill somebody. And they did. 25 of them. When the employees of Imperial Food Products reported to work on Tuesday, September 3, 1991, they could smell chemicals in the air. Maintenance workers had performed repairs to the fryer over the weekend. The last step was replacing the leaking hydraulic line that connected the machine box to the conveyor belt.
However, the maintenance crew's request to swap out the leaking hose with a new one was denied by management. Instead, the plant's mechanic shortened the hose he had on hand and improvised the connection. The fryers were not turned off during the repair, as the user manual recommended, because it would take too long to heat back up. After the repair was made, at 8:15 AM, a switch was flipped to restart the conveyor belt.
There was a loud pop as the hydraulic hose violently disconnected from the machine, followed by the hissing sound of that hose spewing hydraulic fluid across the room. That hydraulic fluid vaporized and ignited when it came into contact with the boiling soybean oil in the industrial fryer. As many as 55 gallons of the fluid covered the room before the flames caused the electricity to shut down. The chicken grease on the walls and floor helped accelerate the fire through the processing room, which was in the center of the plant.
Natural gas was added to the mixture when a gas regulator burned and started leaking. All I seen was a lot of black smoke and flames. And then there was a second explosion like somebody had dropped a bomb. The first sign of a problem for those outside the processing room was when the lights shut off. The telephone lines had also melted. Employees started running in the dark, screaming and slipping on the floors.
The entire plant was engulfed in flames in less than two minutes. The flame-retardant ceiling tiles caught fire, quickly burning a hole in the roof. The U.S. Fire Administration described the blaze as, quote, a fast-moving fireball with smoke so heavy and toxic that it could disable a person in one or two breaths. Somebody else come through to do, y'all run, y'all run, y'all run the plant on fire. And everybody just went...
81 people were working in the Imperial factory that morning. The building was split in half by a curtain of flames. There was no sprinkler system or anything else to slow it down. The only chance at survival was to get out of the building immediately. When I looked back and I saw that black smoke like it was running on through the plant, I just tore off at the door.
The employees in the marinating, cutting and packing rooms located in front of the building exited quickly through the main entrance. Those in the trim and processing rooms on the other side of the fire ran toward the sides and back of the building. Several turned towards the loading dock, but the exit was blocked by an unloading truck.
The driver was in the cab, taking a nap. The panicked workers beat against the truck's trailer with their fists trying to wake him. Others pressed their faces against small openings to the outside, desperate for clean air. I ran out and I couldn't find one door, so the truck was backed up to the loading dock. And my plant manager got down on his knees at the crack of the door and kept telling the truck driver to move the truck, move the truck.
Other employees like Lily Davis tried to exit through the side door of the dumpster. A group of workers held hands trying to navigate through the dark until someone at the front of the line yelled that the door was locked.
That's when the hand-holding stopped, Lily Davis told the Richmond County Journal. People started running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Lily says she accepted her fate. She sat on the floor and began to pray. Quote, I remember feeling so peaceful and good, and then I just fell asleep. They were kicking, just crying and screaming, wanting somebody to open the door. In the break room at the back of the building, another group of employees was trying to find a way out.
The door to the outside was jammed or locked, so they tried to push out the air conditioner window unit. No luck. Bobby Quick, a maintenance worker at Imperial, was one of the people that ended up in the break room. He told the Washington Post that he felt the building shake, then he heard people screaming, and then he saw the fire.
I peed in my clothes, he admitted to the newspaper. My nerves broke down. I opened one door and a flame shot over my head. And I hear screams and screams and screams at the top of their lungs. Please help us. Please help us. Oh God, please help us. We don't want to die. Please help us. They said, get this door. There's a fire out there. Please God, get this door open.
Bobby Quick turned his attention to the locked door and started kicking. It snapped back and knocked me down twice, he told the post. I couldn't breathe. You could just feel all of the oxygen being pulled out of that area. I looked at that door again and seen my family flash before my eyes. So I backed up to the brick wall and I just ran as hard as I could and went for a flying superman kick and it came open.
and all the women that was in there with me come out. Bobby Quick kicked the door so hard that he ruptured multiple discs in his spine, but he made it out alive. And because of him, so did 10 other women who were in the break room with him. Elsewhere in the processing plant, chaos was unfolding. Workers were trampling each other. People were passing out. Coworkers were dying all around them. On the south side of the building, 16 workers found safety in a walk-in cooler. Unfortunately, the door did not shut all the way.
Carbon monoxide soon seeped in. Eleven of the sixteen died there.
Meanwhile, across the street, in the Imperial Administration Annex building, Brad Rowe, wearing his new Myrtle Beach tank top that he scored over the Labor Day weekend, notices the commotion in front of the factory. His father Emmett was not in Hamlet at the time. Brad was calling the shots. He picked up the phone, but there was no dial tone. So Brad Rowe grabbed his keys and sped to the Hamlet Fire Department a few blocks away. At 8.22 a.m., he approached the firefighters and said,
First responders arrived at the scene at 8:27 a.m. Fire Chief David Fuller sent out a mutual aid call to surrounding towns and counties. Over 100 medical and emergency service personnel responded. Not a single one of them had a map of the building or the water source.
Crowds gathered as city workers pried the dumpster away from the wall with a tractor to create an opening. Firefighters were also able to wake the sleeping driver of the truck and trailer that was blocking the loading dock. This is survivor Mary Bryant. I don't remember what position that I was in. I don't know where I was standing, whether I was laying or what. But I remember I was praying and I was asking God to save us. Don't let us die like this.
I said, "Lord, we are not what we're supposed to be, but please don't let us die like this." And somebody said, "You hear me? Follow my voice. Just follow my voice. Just come to where you hear my voice. Come to where you hear my voice." And I went to reach into where I heard the sound, and somebody caught hold of my hand, and they pulled me out.
Dozens of Imperial workers stumbled out of the inferno into the street. "You couldn't tell if the bodies were black or white because everybody was black from the smoke," a Hamlet police lieutenant told the LA Times. The Imperial employees were given oxygen and taken to nearby hospitals still covered in suit. These victims were mostly young, the administrator of the Hamlet hospital told the Washington Post. They had strong hearts. They just had no lungs anymore. By 10:00 a.m., the fire was under control.
Rescue workers entered the building to find survivors and collect bodies as family and friends of the Imperial employees gathered to reunite with their missing loved ones. Imperial was the largest employer in this North Carolina town of 7,000. Just about everyone here knows someone who works there. Throughout the day, residents gathered near the plant hoping for word of survivors. As the final death toll was announced, everywhere today there seemed to be someone grieving.
25 people died in the Imperial Food Products Fire, one of the deadliest industrial disasters in North Carolina history. 18 of the deceased were women. More than half of the women were black. Most of them were mothers or grandmothers. It was reported that 49 children were made orphans because of the fire, including 12-year-old Terrell Quick. His mother, Mary Alice Quick, was found dead inside the factory.
The news hadn't really registered with young Terrell when the New York Times asked him for a reaction. "I thought I was going to get my school shoes like she promised when they called me out," said Terrell, who then, quote, "skipped off, seemingly oblivious to what had happened." The youngest victim was Cynthia Marie Ratliff. She was 20 years old. The oldest was Josephine Barrington. She was 63. Josephine's 37-year-old son, Brad Barrington Jr., also died in the fire.
He had escaped initially but rushed back in to find his mother and never returned. All of the deceased had worked for Imperial except for Phil Dawkins Sr. Phil was a delivery man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was at the processing plant restocking the vending machines when the fire started. Phil Dawkins Sr.'s body was one of the last to be recovered. It was unknowingly handed to his son, Phil Dawkins Jr., a member of the Cordova Volunteer Fire Department who had responded to the scene.
That day, 56 of the 81 Imperial workers at the processing plant escaped the fire. At least 50 of them were seriously injured. Though they had survived, the rest of their days would be haunted by the Phantom.
In the other news today, in the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina, 25 people died when an explosion and a fire gutted a food processing plant. Workers say one door was blocked by a truck and at least three fire exits that were supposed to be open were padlocked from the outside. But other workers had trouble getting out of the plant. A locked door in the canteen, where some were taking a break, had to be kicked off its hinges to get it open.
Employees said another door that was temporarily blocked by a delivery truck delayed the escape of some. And there were complaints that there was no emergency exit in the area where the fire began. No one had ever complained, the state said today, so Imperial Food was assumed to be safe. A first full inspection of the plant will begin once fire officials have finished their grim task.
We have had an unbelievable response from the communities close to us in North Carolina and all across the nation and from throughout the world. From people who've just, from mere expressions of sympathy, to offer unbelievable types of aid, things that we would have never dreamed of, shoes and clothes and toys and Christmas and money and food and just an unbelievable outpouring of sympathy and support.
The town of Hamlet, North Carolina came together in the aftermath of the Imperial Food Products tragedy. Funds were collected to pay outstanding utility bills for victims' families and buy Christmas presents for the recently orphaned. The Textile Workers Union sent nice clothes for the victims to be buried in. The camaraderie was a beautiful thing to see. However, there was an ugly side to it all. Custody battles broke out among the extended family of some of the orphaned children.
Whoever was guardian would get to share in the benefits and the settlements that were coming. And oh, they were coming. Ambulance-chasing lawyers had descended upon the town like vultures, trying to get a piece of whatever meat was left on the bone. Emmett Rowe, another vulture, returned to Hamlet the day after the fire. He wrote a letter to employees in all caps that read, quote,
Emmet Rowe never said another public word about it, but he was in a world of trouble.
Rowe's plant in Georgia was temporarily shut down the day after the fire in Hamlet. Osha had received an anonymous complaint that the facility suffered from the same fire safety issues as the one in North Carolina. With two of his processing facilities shut down, Emmett Rowe was bleeding money. Two weeks after the fire, Rowe's daughter broached the idea of reopening the Hamlet factory to the town's mayor, but it never happened.
Imperial's debtors came calling. Emmett Rowe was financially ruined. On October 9th, 1991, he sent out a final letter stating that the Hamlet facility would not reopen due to Imperial's "an ability to make an arrangement to finance its short and long-term obligations." This is now a community that may be coping with a double-edged tragedy, the loss of life, and possibly the loss of jobs.
Emmett Rowe had spread himself too thin. He had just purchased three new plants in Colorado, Alabama, and Georgia, and he had taken out loans to pay for them all. All three were underperforming. In fact, Rowe had to cease operations at the Alabama property suddenly. The laid-off workers there sued Imperial for not giving them a 60-day notice before shutting down. They won a total of $250,000 in severance pay. By the time the fire happened in Hamlet, they had not received a penny.
In addition to the quarter million he owed to his former Alabama employees, Emmett Rowe also owed thousands of dollars in back taxes, tens of thousands to vendors, and thousands more in unpaid utilities. Evidence showed that Rowe had also recently stopped paying his share of his employees' health insurance. Many of those employees discovered that fact after the fire when they were denied coverage. Rowe had never told them, and he had never stopped deducting the cost from their paychecks.
Emmett Rowe was a cheap bastard. The cheap bastard whose cheapness, investigators say, led to the loss of so much humanity. Not using the correct parts, not turning off the fryers when making repairs, locking the doors. Sure, the fire itself was an accident, but the deaths were completely avoidable.
Hamlet's medical director stated that 24 of the 25 killed workers would have survived if the plant had met safety standards. But safety standards were not met because the plant had not been inspected once since relocating to North Carolina 11 years earlier. The Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet had no evacuation plan, no fire drills, no fire alarm, no sprinklers, and only one fire extinguisher for the entire facility. Why?
because there was no one holding them accountable for safety. At the time, North Carolina's Labor Department had only 45 inspectors to monitor over 150,000 businesses. It was an impossible task, perhaps by design, so inspections were randomly assigned unless the department received a specific complaint. And not once in 11 years had the Labor Department received a complaint about Imperial Foods in Hamlet.
Employees knew they risked being fired if they ever said anything, so it wasn't worth complaining. Even if they had, it probably wouldn't have mattered. The Labor Department's complaint investigators were backlogged for about seven years. Even the federal government had noticed and warned North Carolina that its worker safety program was putting its workers in danger. But nothing was done, and not a single state safety inspector had stepped foot in the Imperial plant in Hamlet until it was far too late.
The United States Department of Agriculture, however, was at the Imperial plant on a daily basis to inspect the quality of the chicken. In 1989, the USDA found flies coming through the door next to the dumpster. To solve the problem without a permit, the Rose constructed a shed around the dumpster area and locked it from the outside.
John Drescher at the Charlotte Observer obtained an inspection report that showed that a USDA inspector had approved the locking of that exit door in June 1991, about two and a half months before the fire. You could theorize that the USDA inspector shouldn't have let the door be locked, but "that's hindsight," said a USDA spokesman at the time. That is asking an awful lot of an inspector, whose primary job is to ensure that food is produced in a safe and sanitary manner.
It's true. USDA inspectors were not trained to recognize safety hazards. But flies can't twist the doorknob. Imperial employees knew the real reason the doors were always locked. Federal and state officials will be investigating reports from some workers that the fire doors were locked because the company was afraid of theft. The company had no comment. The Rose were afraid that their employees were stealing chicken.
Brad Rowe would later publicly deny this, but seven of the plant's nine exterior doors had been locked or obstructed during the fire. When asked by the Associated Press in the immediate aftermath of the incident why the doors were locked, Brad answered, "I can't tell you right now, but there were plenty of doors that were open." Whatever the reason, the safety hazard slipped by unnoticed. Even after local Hamlet officials caught the company pumping free water out of illegal wells and dumping its liquid waste earlier that year,
It became such a problem that basketball-sized chunks of used chicken grease were in the town's water supply. The city threatened to shut down Imperial, but backed off after minor adjustments were made. The city never inspected the facility. Federal safety and health officials had also seemingly dropped the ball. Before moving to Hamlet, Emmet Rose Plant in Pennsylvania had caught fire on three separate occasions.
Roe had been fined by OSHA multiple times for serious violations, yet this information was never communicated to anyone in North Carolina before or after Roe set up shop there. This is Michael Ragland, the Deputy Commissioner of Health and Safety for the North Carolina Department of Labor at the time.
I think what's unfortunate, and I'm not here to try to point fingers at Federal OSHA any more than I think people ought to be pointing fingers at us, but I think if Federal OSHA had been firm in 1987 in Pennsylvania in dealing with this company, they would have sent a message to this company that we, whether it's Federal OSHA or a state program, is not going to stand for these kind of conditions. Instead, they issued seven serious violations dealing specifically with exits and means of egress, and then had an informal conference, reduced the penalty significantly, backed off, never went back again.
Hamlet's fire department was not free from criticism either. In a notarized statement to the Charlotte Observer, Imperial's maintenance director said the fire department had also permitted the doors to be locked as long as the department was given a key. Fire Chief David Fuller denied having any knowledge of the locked doors. He said the fire department didn't need keys because they had bolt cutters.
Chief Fuller also denied rumors that Imperial had paid off the fire department in the form of chicken tenders to turn a blind eye towards the company's numerous safety hazards. And Fuller faced additional scrutiny over the department's call for mutual aid, which never reached Dobbins Heights, an almost entirely African-American community, with the volunteer fire department stationed less than five minutes from the Imperial plant.
Despite offering its assistance multiple times that morning, Dobbins Heights was told to stand by as fire departments further away were invited to help. Some in the community couldn't help but feel that race played a factor. Hamlet Fire Chief David Fuller discounted that notion. He told reporters that competency, not skin color, determined who responded. And he said that the men in Dobbins Heights should have felt, quote, "...honored just to be on standby."
On December 31, 1991, after a two-month investigation, the North Carolina Department of Labor found that Imperial Food Products violated 83 OSHA standards, including 54 willful violations and 23 serious violations, contributing to the magnitude of the disaster. Imperial Food Products was fined $808,150. Victims called the penalty a "slap on the wrist." Emmett Rowe called it "absurd."
The find was politically motivated, Rowe alleged, to keep the administration of North Carolina's worker safety program out of federal hands. "My knowledge of the operation led me to believe it was a safe place to work," Emmett Rowe wrote in a letter. "The fact that I ordered my son Brad to work in the plant should, to reasonable people, dispel any notion that Imperial willfully violated anything which had any likelihood of causing death or serious bodily injury."
Regardless, Emmett Rowe said he couldn't afford to pay the fine anyway, but his troubles were just beginning. On March 10, 1992, a grand jury indicted Emmett Rowe, Brad Rowe, and James Hare, Imperial's plant manager in Hamlet, on 25 counts of involuntary manslaughter.
The charges against Brad Rowe and James Hare were ultimately dropped when Emmett Rowe pleaded guilty about six months later. Good evening. There will be no trial in the Imperial Food Products plant fire case. Today, plant owner Emmett Rowe pled guilty to 25 counts of manslaughter in the deadly fire last year. But Rowe's son and another man, both who managed the plant, will go free as part of the plea bargain. Rowe will be eligible for parole in about three years.
Emmett Rowe was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was released after serving just under four. Former Imperial workers felt betrayed by justice once again. And not that it was any consolation, but at least by then, many of the 100 lawsuits that had been filed in response to the tragedy had been consolidated and settled.
In total, the plaintiffs were awarded $24 million from various defendants, including the Rose, the City, and certain equipment manufacturers. The average payout was around $50,000 per victim. The largest payout of over a million dollars was awarded to Mildred Motes. Mildred Motes was 48 years old at the time of the Imperial Fire. They found her covered in footprints and soot on the floor of the marinating and mixing room.
She was airlifted to a hospital in Chapel Hill with at best a 5% chance of survival. Her husband, Olin, suffered a heart attack in the waiting room from all the stress. He recovered, but Mildred never really did. She was alive, but would require constant care for the rest of her life. Doctors said she was neurologically unresponsive. She could no longer read. She could no longer see. Her feet were permanently curled, and her arms were so immobile she couldn't hold a spoon.
According to the Assembly Magazine, Mildred Motes died in 2015 from breast cancer that likely went untreated for months because of her inability to communicate. Mildred's final settlement check had arrived earlier that day, further proof that money can't fix everything. Ask any of the Hamlet survivors and they will tell you that they'd trade all the money in the world to be free of their physical and emotional pain. It's been more than 30 years since the tragedy, and many still can't sleep.
In addition to debilitating injuries, they suffer from PTSD, survivor's guilt, addiction issues, paranoia, anxiety. "In the dream I went back to work," Elaine Griffin told the Associated Press. "I could visualize what it would be like, those footprints on the door. From that dream I knew I would never be able to work there no more." Elaine Griffin was found dead in her trailer a few years later. She had been shot in the head by her husband in an argument over these settlement money.
Bobby Quick, the man who kicked down the break room door, was also a tortured soul. Like many others, he spent a week at the Pinehurst Psychiatric Hospital after punching out a window which shredded his arm. Others, like Mary Bryant, say they can't even get out of bed some days. I went back to school since the accident, but I couldn't function. I couldn't remember. I couldn't spell. I can't function.
Tootsie Malachi told the Raleigh News and Observer that she had changed so much after the fire, her boyfriend said he didn't recognize her anymore. She had withdrawn from society. She told the LA Times she felt like she didn't have a future. Patricia Hatcher's husband felt the same way. His future was stolen. He killed himself six months after Patricia died from her lingering injuries.
Phil Dawkins Jr., the volunteer firefighter who helped recover his father's lifeless body, ruined his own life. He was sentenced to life in prison three years after the fire. Phil Jr. shot his wife Wendy in the head and anchored her to the bottom of the Pee Dee River.
The horror stories surrounding the Imperial fire were endless. They were easily dredged up. The decaying corpse of the Imperial food products plant remained standing for ten years after the fire. The footprints on the doors, the claw marks on the walls, the weathered caution tape, all were still visible. The residents on the black side of Hamlet had to relive that horrific moment every time they drove down the block.
It was another slap in the face. There's no way that building would still stand if it were next door to the country club, many complained. It wasn't until 2002, 11 years after the fire, that the former Imperial plant was declared a public nuisance by the state and finally torn down. In its place, a simple granite marker stands. A more elaborate memorial was built further down Bridges Street. There's a third memorial at the nearby City Lake.
You know, protecting the health and safety of our country's workers is an important national value. It's something we should all share. From the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire back in 1911, which galvanized the conscience of our nation.
to the fire in Hamlet, North Carolina in 1991, which I remember so very well because 25 poultry workers were killed there and thousands and thousands of people work in the poultry industry in my home state. We have recognized that we have a special responsibility as a people to ensure that workers are not put in undue jeopardy.
In response to the Imperial Fire, the North Carolina General Assembly passed 14 new worker safety laws, including whistleblower protections, funding for more OSHA inspectors, and requirements that local fire departments inspect factories and draw up detailed firefighting plans in case of an emergency. The USDA also agreed that inspectors would be cross-trained to report serious workplace hazards, but that never happened.
In the 27 years since the agreement was signed, the Assembly magazine found no evidence that USDA has ever sent a single written complaint involving worker safety anywhere in the nation to OSHA as the agreement required. There's no sense in asking if any lessons were learned when, as John Drescher, writing for the Assembly, points out,
One of the principal lessons of the tragedy, that government inspectors of all types should be trained to recognize and report serious safety hazards, was largely disregarded. Drescher also found that in the last decade, from about 2010 to 2020, inspections of non-construction worksites in North Carolina were down by more than half, and he discovered that 25% of the state's workplace inspector jobs were vacant. Now, that's what we call business-friendly.
As of 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that only 2.8% of North Carolina workers were unionized, the second lowest percentage among states. Perhaps it's time to organize. If the state won't protect its workers, the workers must protect themselves. They have failed them as stated by your panelists by not having enough inspectors, by not inspecting the plant in 11 years, by not making sure that the workers were safe.
If the local state and federal government is not concerned about worker safety, then the worker must be concerned about his own safety. And I cannot understand how we can see organized labor in Poland. We must have organized labor in South Africa for apartheid. But when we come to organize in Richmond County, everybody says it's a no. There's so much fear. There's so much pent-up misunderstandings about organized labor.
That's why we have the audience that we have here today. I feel that dearly in my heart that many people are confused about organized labor, that labor grants us our freedom. Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, a.k.a. Deformer, a.k.a. Boning and Packing.
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My name is Kayla from North Carolina. My name is Eleanor. I'm calling from New Orleans, Louisiana. My name is Christine from Scotland. And I'm a concerned citizen and a valued listener. Remember, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not trying to fuck you over.
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