One evening last April at the Tesoro Corp.’s refinery in Anacortes, Washington, Matt Gumbel and six co-workers cautiously returned to service a stack of giant, radiator-like tubes filled with volatile hydrocarbons. The tubes, known as heat exchangers, tended to leak, especially during start-up, and workers sometimes armed themselves with long, steam-spewing lances to keep any escaping vapors from igniting.
Nearby, another stack of exchangers droned at full temperature and pressure.
Away from work, Gumbel, 34, enjoyed off-trail snowboarding and driving his turbocharged sports compact. On the job, he had a reputation as a meticulous worker. One has to be. Gasoline and other fuels are made from hot, sometimes barely contained brews of combustible substances. Gumbel knew the hazards intimately; he’d followed his father’s footsteps into a job at the refinery.
Not long after midnight, as the crew monitored the equipment being brought back online, welds on one of the exchangers running a few feet away suddenly blew, engulfing the seven workers in a fireball of naphtha, a mixture of liquid hydrocarbons. The inferno melted aluminum up to 100 feet away. Four of the workers died instantly, three later.
Paul Gumbel — Matt’s father — witnessed the explosion from about 150 yards away. The elder Gumbel seized his firefighting gear — refinery workers typically must know how to use it — and raced toward the blaze.
He spotted a dead man and two women — alive but badly burned. Then another man, still breathing but aflame. As Paul Gumbel tried to comfort the wounded, he kept thinking: Where’s Matt?
Matt was alive. Enshrouded in a fire blanket, he had managed to stumble away from the wreckage. Burns covered two-thirds of his body. Rushed by ambulance to the hospital, he survived 22 days before succumbing.
