The day Synthron exploded: Remembering the 2006 Blast that shook Burke County

The powerful sonic blast hit at about 11:30 a.m. on Jan. 31, 2006, a sudden acoustic punch that rattled homes and businesses miles away and left people across Burke County pausing mid-step to ponder what had just happened.

Within minutes, a thick column of coal-black smoke climbed above Morganton’s Synthron chemical plant on a 3.8-acre site at the intersection of Amherst Road and Kirksey Drive. It was visible for miles. Witnesses described a fireball bursting into the air as the plant’s metal building collapsed.

The event carried a sense of danger that was hard to miss, the kind that makes you look up, listen, and start calling the people you love.

Although the explosion impacted Morganton and its residents, the roots of the disaster can be traced back some 4,000 miles to industrial mismanagement in France. The investigative reports, which continue on pages 4A-6A, explore the details.

Firefighters arriving on scene found the force of the explosion had thrown debris onto Amherst Road. Sections of the old asphalt burned, and power lines arced in a nearby ditch. Emergency officials said Synthron produced additives for liquid paint, and responders approached the smoke plume cautiously because of the chemicals involved.

And the tragedy was years in the making.

On that day in 2006, The Paper’s Editor Emeritus Bill Poteat was an English teacher at East Burke High School. He had spent the previous night in the intensive care unit at Grace Hospital with his critically ill mother and had not slept. He was in bed at his Valdese home when the blast occurred. The explosion shook the windows and jolted him awake.

When he later learned where the explosion occurred, he harkened back immediately to a telephone call he had received in the late 1990s when he was editor of the Morganton News Herald.

“I got a call from a man who refused to identify himself,” Poteat remembered. “But I assumed he was an employee of Synthron. He talked a lot about the safety violations occurring at the plant, and before he hung up, he said, ‘That place is going to blow sky high one day.’”

Investigating the operations of a private industry is a difficult task, but Poteat remembers asking a News Herald reporter to check with a state regulatory agency. “Nothing ever came of it,” he said. “We should have pushed harder.”

On The Scene

“Remembering the look on their faces — they were sitting on a curb all lined up, trying to be triaged,” said paramedic Joe Belanger, one of the first on the scene and reflecting on the 14 surviving victims who were at Synthron when the blast occurred. “Who’s the highest priority patient? Who needs to go first?”

“You hear the boom, but I felt a physical feeling,” he said. “You could literally feel the pull towards the explosion, and then the blast pushed you. … My buddy said, ‘Man, there’s been a bad wreck over there.’ I said, ‘No, that’s Synthron.’”

Belanger raced to the chemical plant, where victims stood by the gate with flash burns, singed hair, and thousand-yard stares — a sight he said he’d never forget.

Almost immediately, streets around Amherst Road were shut down and traffic rerouted. Officers kept school buses out of the area as Burke County Public Schools worked to reunite students with parents, directing families to pick children up at their schools or arrange drop-off points. Superintendent David Burleson said the school system was following the guidance of emergency management and Public Safety.

Morganton Public Safety Chief Mark Tolbert said there was never a forced evacuation. Any evacuations were voluntary, he told media. The Red Cross opened a shelter at the Collett Street Recreation Center.

Morganton City Manager Sally Sandy said she also remembers the day very well.

“When the explosion happened, I was in the conference room up here, on the second floor (of city hall),” Sandy said. “We were in a meeting and the windows shook.”

The Synthron response was complicated by timing.

Sandy said that responders had just put out a fire at her brother’s business, Appalachian Woodwrights, and arrived at city hall to fill her in when the Synthron explosion occurred. Assuming it was a resurgence of the earlier fire, she rushed over to find the firemen sitting outside, rehydrating.

Among those firemen was fire engineer Clay Rudicill, who said he felt the explosion from Synthron before seeing the plume of smoke on the horizon.

They all hurried to the chemical plant, where command put Rudicill in charge of water supplies and instructed him not to use the hydrants in the parking lot due to concerns of damaged waterlines.

Rudicill ran a line from the training grounds nearly 3,000 feet away.

“We started fighting fire wherever and however we could, to get people in the area safe,” Rudicill said.

Burke County Sheriff’s Office stepped in to handle law enforcement duties for the city of Morganton. Sheriff John T. McDevitt said off-duty personnel were summoned, and the North Carolina Highway Patrol was placed on standby to help with traffic wrecks if needed. An estimated 20 agencies responded, including state water and air quality officials.

To fight the plant fire, crews set up unmanned deluge guns and used foam that blankets flames and smothers heat. Tolbert said responders planned to remain on scene through the night, monitoring hot spots and waiting until daylight to send in full crews as temperatures dropped and chemicals began to settle.

Across town, people tried to get eyes on what they were seeing in the sky. Crowds climbed the steep bank behind the Bi-Lo on U.S. 70, slipping on grass and weeds, some crawling the last stretch just to reach a vantage point. From there, they pointed cameras into the haze and flipped open phones to describe the scene to friends and family.

Several residents told media outlets the shock felt like a blow to the chest. One witness said the explosion sounded like someone beating on a window. Another described a huge boom followed by a vacuum-like swoosh, then black smoke and flying debris. A man said he was watching “The Price Is Right” when the blast shook his home and blew a fan out of the window. A welder working about a quarter-mile away said the explosion threw metal from the walls and knocked out the lights. Another resident said the force knocked items off the wall inside his home. Those accounts were reported in media coverage.

Various agencies, both government and private, removed more than 19,000 gallons of liquid waste and more than 45,000 pounds of unused product in the year following the explosion, according to an EPA pollution report published in January 2007.

What remained, for much of Morganton that day, was the sight of dark smoke hanging over town, the feeling of impact still in the body, and the uneasy quiet that follows a loud thing no one expected.