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There are three groups of historical burn
events for North Carolina catalogued here on this website.
They are:
Prior to 1985
     
1985-Present
      
Aircraft Crashes
Historical Burn Events in the
Past 25 Years across North Carolina with respect to the location
of the Major Medical and Trauma Centers.
These events include:
- Hamlet Fire, Imperial Foods, the third most deadly industrial fire in
the history of the US.
- Pope Air Force Base, Collision of F-16 and C-130, with an eventual
crash involving a C-141. (While this event could have easily been placed
with the Aircraft Crashes, it was an event that focused on the
ground injuries. With other aircraft crashes, there were
fatalities on the aircraft in flight. The Pope event involved
a F-16 that crashed after the pilot ejected, the unmanned aircraft
then slammed into the runway, skidding across it and eventually
struck a C-141 parked back of the tarmac while paratroopers were
preparing to load.)
- West Pharmaceuticals, a result of
a dust explosion, wrecked the building collapsing concrete and steel
walls claiming 6 lives and injuring 38. Based on the visible
damage to the building immediately following the explosion, this
event could have been far more catastrophic than it was.
- Environmental Quality, was an
event that occurred shortly after midnight at a Hazardous Materials
storage and recovery facility. At the time of the explosion
and fire, no one was in the facility. While the injuries were
limited to firefighters and those living in the immediate area, once
again only luck prevented a more significant event.
- Davie Place Fire, in contrast, not
a terribly significant event. Placed here merely to
demonstrate where we are in history. This was originally
reported as a "car bomb". The actual cause as a patient
smoking, igniting and leading to an oxygen tank explosion. The
tank was located near an exterior wall. The blast concussion
included blowing brick and building materials onto a car parked
outside the facility. Thus, as one of the first to report the
explosion, seeing the damage to the vehicle thought it was a "car
bomb".
- Snow Hill School Bus Collision,
was located in Greene County. Greene County has no hospital,
and is a rural county much like many other rural communities across
the state and the nation. Lessons learned here have broad
application.
Aside from these events in the past 25 years, other catastrophic events that have occurred in the state over the past two
hundred years include the fire at the Highland Hospital in Asheville and
the fire that burned much of the town of Fayetteville.
The National Guard
Base was built within 25 feet of an abandoned and unmonitored landfill.
The methane that was produced by the decay of the items in the landfill
seeped into the station and the Explosion that resulted, September 27, 1969,
killed 3, permanently disabled 7, and injured 25, with 12 of whom were
seriously injured. This event lead to significant changes related
to landfills across the company by the Environmental Protection Agency.
3 Killed, 25 were
injured 12 of which were seriously injured.
www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy98/25035.pdf
The Photo Top Left is found at
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/us/102907nchousefire/im:/071028/480/4bfeff8d735643899eb814c14e6052c6;_ylt=AtQt20a7GuLbrxLVS6t.KxpsaMYA
and is from the early morning fire in Ocean Isle, on October 29, 2007
that claimed seven lives.
This site was last updated
12/12/08
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