An Unhappy Easter in West Reading: The R. M. Palmer Chocolate Factory Explosion

 

Chocolate Easter bunnies are a minor but long-established part of the holiday, which will be celebrated a week from today. They are well-known enough to be the subject of a long-running shtick in the comic strip "Sally Forth," in which the mother always finds the daughter's chocolate Easter bunny and eats the ears off.  But somebody has to make chocolate Easter bunnies, and one of the prominent suppliers of such is the R. M. Palmer Company of West Reading, Pennsylvania.

 

Around 4:30 P. M. on Friday, Mar. 24, several employees of the 850 or so in the West Reading facility smelled gas.  Patricia Borges, who had worked in the factory for four years, approached a supervisor and asked if they were going to be evacuated.  She says she was told that such a decision would have to be made by someone higher up, and so Borges went back to work.

 

Just prior to 5 P. M., a tremendous explosion demolished much of the two-story brick factory and damaged several nearby buildings.  Surrounded by flames, Borges began to run and fell through the floor into a basement vat of chocolate, which extinguished a fire that had attached itself to her arm.  But her feet were injured by the fall.  As the vat began to fill with water from fire-fighting equipment, she managed to crawl onto the lip of the tank and onto the floor, which was flooding with water.  Dazed, she lost track of time until much later, when she heard noises of rescue workers searching the rubble.  She cried out ,and rescuers pulled her from the building and took her to a hospital, where she is being treated for burns and broken bones in her feet.

 

Seven of her co-workers were killed and about twelve more were injured in the blast, which is under investigation by both state and federal authorities.  A statement on the homepage of the R. M. Palmer Company addressed to "our R. M. Palmer teammates" says "Our thoughts and prayers are with you during this difficult time."  But the rest of the site is unchanged, and presents brightly colored ads for Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, and Christmas candy over the company's slogan "Making Candy Fun."

 

Lest we lapse into a bathetic mode, let us note that the same employees would be just as dead or injured had they been making 45-caliber ammunition instead of candy.  Factory workers in any facility have a right to expect that their place of employment will not put them at daily risk of life or limb, and while working in a munitions plant might call that expectation into question, you would think making candy would be a fairly safe way of earning a living.  And most of the time, it is.

 

We will have to await the results of investigations to learn the cause or causes of the explosion, but one thing seems to be pretty clear from Borges' testimony already.  Whoever her supervisor was, he or she made a fatal mistake in not responding to the smell of gas by ordering an immediate shutdown and evacuating the plant.

 

Such a decision is not to be made lightly, of course.  Especially with continuous-process plants, an emergency shutdown entails hazards of its own and a guaranteed cost in lost product, lost time, and other costly issues.  But against these costs must be weighed the imponderable but real chance that a catastrophic accident may be averted, or at least minimized, by a shutdown and evacuation. 

 

Different types of manufacturing have different cultures, including different safety cultures.  The petrochemical industry deals constantly with highly flammable and explosive materials under conditions of temperature and pressure that make an accident almost guaranteed if a leak occurs.  Because of this, they have developed a safety culture that to an outsider seems extreme in its emphases on training, precautions, and rigorous rules that can get an employee fired for violating them even if nothing bad results from the violation.

 

I have no idea what type of safety and training programs were in place at the R. M. Palmer Company.  News reports indicate few recorded violations of OSHA rules in the recent past, but candy manufacturing is not a typically dangerous process.  Gas leaks can occur at any facility where gas is stored or used, however, and procedures should be in place for precautions to be taken in the event of a gas smell.

 

This incident calls to mind an accident at a chicken processing plant in January of 2021 in which a liquid-nitrogen leak asphyxiated six workers who were apparently not informed of the hazards that were involved.  Again, proper training would have at least minimized the number of fatalities, but in the event, the company was fined over a million dollars for OSHA violations.

 

Perhaps it's a fantasy, but wouldn't it be nice if there was some sort of rule that required upper-level managers to don working clothes once every few months and take the place of a sick or absent worker in the factories they supervise?  Some managers have worked their way up from the factory floor, and probably wouldn't benefit that much from returning to their old haunts.  But others would have their eyes opened at the conditions that their employees endure, and I think such a policy might do more for safety and other working conditions than any number of OSHA rules. 

 

Maybe I've mentioned this before, but it's worth saying again.  Back when I was in high school, I attended an Explorer Scout program that met in a telephone exchange building operated by the Bell System.  A plaque was prominently displayed on the wall of the meeting room, and it read "No job is so important and no service is so urgent that we cannot take time to perform our work safely."  The Bell System was far from a perfect organization, but at least it had high aspirations for safety.  And that motto has struck me as being something to keep in mind the next time a safety issue arises and a supervisor has to decide whether to protect workers at some cost.  For all I know, that supervisor may have paid for the bad decision with his or her life.  But the rest of us are still around to learn from it.

 

Sources:  I referred to Associated Press reports on the accident carried at the sites https://apnews.com/article/pennsylvania-chocolate-factory-explosion-survivor-c1c8e8cb8ee585db9cc9277fbb0b88e3 and https://apnews.com/article/pennsylvania-chocolate-factory-explosion-e4b3197a3cfa6d3a93a7519d83a7aa26.  The R. M. Palmer company website is https://rmpalmer.com/. 

 

NOTE TO READERS:  After a reader noted that my RSS feed was apparently not working, and there was no way to request email notifications of new posts, I investigated ways of improving these situations. 

 

You will now see a sidebar to the right labeled "Email Subscription" and another one labeled "RSS Feed."  For those of you equipped with the proper RSS feed software, clicking on the RSS feed should work properly.  (Otherwise, you are likely to get just a large page full of HTML code, but this is not a malfunction.) 

 

Filling in your email and clicking on the Subscribe link should bring you to a page that will inform you of receiving a confirmation email.  Clicking on the link in that email should sign you up for receiving notifications.  The system is new, so I'm not sure how one goes about unsubscribing, but there should be a way to do that too.  Please notify me of any problems or issues with this system, and thanks to the folks at tekRESCUE of San Marcos for setting it up.

Is the Internet Making Us Too Literate?

 

Writing in the Spring 2022 issue of The New Atlantis, British author Kit Wilson wonders if the Internet is endangering our mental health by metaphorically burying us in words. 

 

In support of this conclusion, he cites some statistics.  For example, a report that the prestigious management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co. published in 2012 stated that the average time Americans spent reading or writing each day was between one and two hours from 1900 all the way up to 1990.  But when the Internet came along and was joined by text messaging, that number rose to around four to five hours a day—almost a third of a person's disposable free time (that is, when you're not doing something like eating or going to the bathroom—and I'm sure some people read while doing those things too). 

 

He also found a journalist who claims that your average person browsing the Internet as part of their daily routine may expose themselves to as many as 490,000 words a day, which approaches the length of Tolstoy's War and Peace (600,000 words, according to Wikipedia's "List of Longest Novels.") 

 

But nobody reads the Internet like you would read War and Peace, and therein lies the problem.

 

Have we exploited digital technology's amazing ability to multiply words practically without end to flood cyberspace with an ocean of words that threaten to drown us? 

 

My title is something of a conundrum.  Being unable to read is what illiteracy means, but what is the measure of reading too much?  We have all known the so-called bookworm type who seems to prefer the library to the clubroom or the bar.  That isn't the problem here, because there were bookworms before the Internet. 

 

For his part, Wilson seems to be concerned that as we deal with the world more and more as it is mediated to us in the form of words, we will lose track of what reality is really like and begin to treat it as an abstraction that words adequately describe.  The overarching theme of this issue of The New Atlantis is expressed by the somewhat grim cover title "Reality:  A Post-Mortem." 

 

I think it's a little premature to write reality's obituary just yet, but I have to admit a general sense of creepiness remains with me after reading it. 

 

The problem we face was captured neatly by C. S. Lewis in his 1946 sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength, which involves a young sociologist named Mark Studdock who gradually becomes embroiled in some sinister doings as a part of his new job with the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N. I. C. E.).  Mark was already in a bad way with regard to reality even before he took on his new job.  As Lewis points out:  " . . . his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw.  Statistics about agricultural laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer's boy, was the shadow."

 

So the tendency has been with us longer than the Internet to take the written word more seriously than the reality that it attempts (always incompletely) to describe.  As Lewis shows later in the novel, this habit allows wicked people to do heinous things with the stroke of a pen—after all, the only direct contact a manager might have with the consequences of his order to liquidate thousands of people will be the alteration in some columns of population figures. 

 

Having access to more words than ever isn't all bad.  When evil is exposed to the light, it can lead to good people fighting it more effectively.  The Internet makes keeping secrets much harder, especially if they are secrets about evil things done in public. 

 

I may not be the best person to write about this problem, because whether out of old habits or laziness or something else, I think I am on the low end of Wilson's estimates of how much time people spend reading stuff on the Internet.  While I will admit to the occasional lapse of falling down a rabbit hole out of random curiosity, I try to be in charge whenever I'm browsing and attempt to keep my destination in mind.  If you know what you want before you go into the store, you'll probably spend less time (and money) there, and the same thing is true of the Internet.

 

If there's a specific problem caused by the superabundance of words on the Internet, it consists in what it's done to our reading habits.  Back when it took a person half a bottle of ink and an hour to write a three-page letter, the recipient felt obliged at least to read every word, and maybe some parts over more than once.

 

But now that words are so cheap and easily multiplied, we just zip through paragraphs like kids hunting for Easter eggs on the lawn—who needs all this grass?  Get to the good part.  But what if the good part won't emerge unless you read the whole thing?

 

If you've done me the good turn to read every word I've written down to this point, you have my thanks and appreciation.  But you are probably the exception.  Nobody can pay that kind of close attention to 490,000 words a day, nor should they.  The best we can do is to be a lot more selective about the stuff we look for, and favor sites that are well-curated (the term used to be "edited") which allow in only material that is truly worth our attention.  Because attention is what we bring to the table, or the screen, and because it's so limited, we should treat it as the valuable commodity that it is, for our own good and for the good of society as well.

 

Sources:  Kit Wilson's article "Reading Ourselves to Death" appears on pp. 73-79 of the Spring 2022 issue of The New Atlantis.