Woman survived deadly factory blast by falling into a vat of molten chocolate
A woman who caught fire and was buried beneath rubble after a huge explosion at a chocolate factory survived after falling into a vat of liquid chocolate.
Seven people were killed in the blast at the R.M Palmer Co. plant in Pennsylvania on March 24, which destroyed one building and damaged a number of neighbouring apartments.
As flames engulfed the building, employee Patricia Borges felt her arm catch on fire, and soon afterwards plummeted through the floor and into the liquid vat below.
The molten chocolate extinguished Ms Borges’ blazing arm but she wound up breaking her collarbone and both of her heels in the fall, and spent the next nine hours waiting for rescue and screaming for help as firefighters battled the inferno and choppers thumped overhead.
‘When I began to burn, I thought it was the end for me,’ said Borges, 50, in an interview from her hospital bed in West Reading, Pennsylvania- just minutes from the chocolate factory where she worked as a machine operator.
Borges said she and others had complained about a gas odour about 30 minutes before the factory blew up, but her supervisors refused to evacuate the building.
The subsequent blast killed 10 people and injured seven- including Borges’ close friend, Judith Lopez-Moran— and she claims their deaths could’ve been prevented.
Speaking in Spanish over videoconference, her eyes bruised and her burned right arm heavily bandaged, Borges recounted her terrifying brush with death.
The factory was getting ready for a product switch that day, so instead of running a candy-wrapping machine as usual, she was helping to clean.
At around 4:30 p.m, Borges said she smelled natural gas. Borges and her co-workers approached their supervisor, and asked them if they were going to be evacuated.
Borges said the supervisor noted someone higher up would have to make that decision. So she got back to work.
30 minutes later, the two-story brick building exploded.
Borges, who’d been on a ladder, was thrown to the ground. She heard screaming. There was fire everywhere, and the flames quickly overtook her.
‘I asked God why he was giving me such a horrible death,’ she said. ‘I asked him to save me, that I didn’t want to die in the fire.’
She began to run. That’s when the floor gave way, and she could feel herself falling— into a long, horizontal tank of chocolate in the factory’s basement.
At 4 feet, 10 inches tall, Borges landed on her feet in chest-high liquid. The chocolate extinguished the flames, but the impact of the fall ended up breaking her feet.
She was eventually able to climb out of the vat as water from the firefighters’ hoses filled the tank, and jumped into a pool of water that had formed on the basement floor. Briefly submerged, Borges said she swallowed a mouthful of water before surfacing. She grabbed onto some plastic tubing.
And then she waited.
‘Help, help, please help!’ she yelled, over and over, for hours. No one came.
The pain grew more intense. The water was frigid. The main supply pipe for the building’s fire suppression system had ruptured — and water was pouring into the basement. She lost track of time but thought she might be there for days.
‘The only thing I wanted was to get out of there,’ she said.
Finally, in the middle of the night, she saw a light and screamed anew for help.
Search-and-rescue dogs had alerted their handlers that a survivor might be in the rubble. Now, as rescuers carefully worked their way down to the basement, they heard Borges’s cries.
Calling for quiet, the rescuers followed the sound of her voice. They found her in a tight space, in chest-deep water. She made her way to them and was placed in a litter.
‘She was severely hypothermic and banged up,’ said Ken Pagurek, a captain in the Philadelphia Fire Department who helped lead the rescue team.
‘I think had they not gotten to her when they did, there was a very good chance the number of victims was going to be plus one,’ he added.
Borges now faces surgery on both feet and a long recovery. Her family has launched a GoFundMe campaign to help her pay the bills.
She first came to the United States 31 years ago, from Puebla state in south-central Mexico. Spent four years working at Palmer and said she is now seeking accountability for the incident.
‘I wanted to speak so that this will be prevented in the future,” she said. “For my colleague Judy, I want there to be justice.’
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