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Sugar Refinery Fire Extinguished At Last

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By GREG BLUESTEIN, The Associated Press

Published: February 15, 2008

PORT WENTWORTH, Ga. - Firefighters on Thursday finally doused the last flames of a deadly sugar refinery blast, a week after the refinery ignited.

An eighth victim badly burned in the explosion died. At least one worker remained missing, and firefighters hoped to get inside the building to search after extinguishing the fire.

Sugar dust is thought to be the cause of the Feb. 7 blast. Emergency crews were able to snuff out the fire at the plant's main building Wednesday, but the blaze persisted at the refinery's 80-foot silos.

Local crews had to call in a specialized team with powerful equipment to assault the silo fires, where thick masses of molten sugar were still smoldering even after a helicopter dumped thousands of gallons of water.

The team extinguished the stubborn blazes using a mix of foam and water that lowered the temperatures inside the silos from as high as 4,000 degrees to below 70 degrees, said Port Wentworth Fire Chief Greg Long.

The eighth victim, Michael Kelly Fields, 40, died early Thursday at the Joseph M. Still Burn Center at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, spokeswoman Beth Frits said. Sixteen other workers remained hospitalized there, 14 of them in critical condition, she said.

The refinery is on a 160-acre site on the Savannah River upstream from Savannah. The plant was 872,000 square feet, and about 12 percent of it was destroyed, company spokesman Steve Behm said.

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