3 Severely Burned In Whitehall Explosion
September 6, 2018
WHITEHALL, PA (KDKA) —
The owner of a Bethel Park flooring company was among the three contractors injured in a violent and unusual explosion at a Whitehall home Wednesday night.
All three men working on a job in the basement of a home in a residential neighborhood remain at Mercy Hospital with severe burns, two are in critical condition. Melted shoes and tattered clothes remain visible, evidence of the violent explosion that rocked this Whitehall home and sent neighbors running to help the injured.
One of the victims working for Sims Speciality Flooring of Bethel Park has been identified. The company’s president, David Sims, was severely burned while working in the basement of the home. The two other men have yet to be identified.
Around 7:30 Wednesday night three contractors from the flooring company were severely burned while working in a home on the 4300 block of McKee Drive. Homeowners Albert and Machelle DeCarlo, were remodeling their basement according to neighbors.
“The worst part was the blood-curdling screams. Burn victims sustain so much pain,” said Ashley Sites, registered nurse and neighbor.
(Photo Credit: Meghan Schiller/KDKA)
Sites said she heard a loud boom and didn’t think anything of it. Then she heard screaming and walked outside to see the three workers screaming a few doors down. She quickly sprang into action.
“I had said ‘Well, we need to preserve as much skin as we can, we need to wash the chemicals off,’” Sites said. “I couldn’t touch them, I didn’t have gloves on, so we got towels. We were able to use that as a barrier, put that around them to keep the skin moist, wash the chemicals off.”
Firefighters and EMS arrived within minutes and transported the victims to UPMC Mercy’s burn unit.
Neighbors and firefighters told KDKA it appeared that the workers were preparing to stain the concrete floor in the home’s basement. The fumes from the chemicals ignited in some way and turned into a fire ball that burst out of the home.
“It was definitely an experience and probably a life-changing moment for a lot of us,” Carllie Reck, a next-door neighbor, said.
Reck said the boom shook her wall-mounted television. One of the victims ran to her front door.
“When he was at my door, his face was stark white and his eyes weren’t really open. You could see holes in his shirt,” Reck said.
(Photo Credit: Meghan Schiller/KDKA) The flooring materials still sat in the backyard on Thursday, marked “flammable.” The door rests on the driveway, charred around the edges. The windows to the basement also appear black around the edges.
The Whitehall Fire Department said the residents on the second floor were not hurt.
Nationally from 1992-2002, 52 fatal injuries were sustained by workers in the floor laying/other floor work business (Standard Industrial Code 1752, not necessarily wood floors). Of these injuries, 21% (11/52) resulted from fires and explosions. Five of the workers who died due to fire or explosion were employed specifically in wood floor sanding. These fires as well as air pollution from certain floor finishing products can present public safety and health threats to the residents of the affected buildings and neighborhoods. The New York City Fire Department has instituted citywide regulations restricting the use of flammable products.
The products implicated in these fires are frequently flammable liquids, especially lacquer sealers. Flammable liquids have flash points under 100° F. This means that any spark or ignition source can easily ignite the mixture of product vapor and air near the surface of the liquid when it reaches these temperatures. In fact, some floor finishing products have flash points well below normal room temperatures, around 50° F or 25° F.
Some of the most flammable products are certain lacquer sealers, which have been implicated in several recent fires. These types of sealers are inexpensive and dry very quickly. Therefore, they are used by some contractors as a quick first coat under coats of finish.
Safety measures recommended for using flammable liquids include preventing known sources of sparks. This involves extinguishing all pilot lights, disconnecting electric appliances such as stoves and refrigerators, covering electric outlets, using only non-sparking tools, and, of course not smoking. All containers should be closed when they are not in use to prevent sparks from coming into contact with the vapor-air mixture above the surface of the liquid.
In addition, maintaining ventilation as stipulated in the manufacturer’s instructions will help dilute the product vapors in the rest of the room, potentially to a concentration that is too low to ignite. The challenge to these safety measures results from the fact that is nearly impossible to prevent all sparks. For example, use of ventilation devices requires electricity, which can produce sparks.
Turning on a light switch can produce sparks. Simply pouring liquid from one container to
another can create enough friction to cause sparks if containers are not grounded. Static
electricity can also result from other types of friction, especially in dry weather. Striking a metal object, such as a nail or staple in the floor, can produce sparks.
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