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This sounds like it will be far worse.
It was the day that people in Romeoville felt the ground shake.
On July 23, 1984, an explosion rocked the Union Oil Co. refinery, sending a 34-ton tower flying into a small field just beyond nearby houses. A second blast was so severe that an airplane flying 1,500 feet above the plant was struck by debris. The raging fire flashed to temperatures of 4,000 degrees.
Seventeen people were killed at the Romeoville refinery that day, in what a decade later is still the nation's second worst oil refinery disaster.
"We couldn't believe anything like that could happen here," said Stephen Clancy, then the assistant fire chief in Romeoville and now the department's chaplain.
Two other disasters in Will County have resulted in more casualties: the 1942 industrial explosion at the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant, which killed 48 workers, and the 1990 Plainfield tornado, which killed 28 people.
But the refinery explosion, felt, seen and heard across much of the southwest suburban area, was especially memorable. Residents of Romeoville, Lockport and Lemont still talk about where they were or what they were doing when the explosion lit up the night sky "like a mushroom cloud."
"They'll all tell you it's the day they felt the ground shake," said Dave Skoryi, then a 24-year-old firefighter in Lockport, where a picture of the fire still hangs in Station No. 1.
Shortly before 6 p.m. that day, a worker making a routine hourly check of a pressure tower discovered a hairline crack in a circular weld.
Bradley Turner, a truck driver from Munster, Ind., had just finished unloading sulfuric acid inside the plant when he heard the alarm.
He waited for the all-clear signal. But as Bob Gomer and his co-workers worked to close the pressure valve, a spark caused an explosion and the workers "hit their bellies," he said. The second explosion rocked buildings 15 miles away, blew the windows out of a bank in Joliet and sent smoke billowing 2,000 feet.
"You could feel the heat waves coming at you," said Lt. David Jerling, a Lockport firefighter who responded to the explosion within the first hour and fought the fire throughout the night. Firefighters from 30 suburban departments joined the Union Oil crew in battling the blaze.
Though the fire was under control by midnight, the area was just beginning to feel its impact.
Gomer, now 42, ended up spending five weeks in intensive care, hospitalized with severe burns over almost 70 percent of his body. He said the explosion killed most of the other workers in the area where he was working.
"It's kind of hard not to (remember)," said Gomer, whose body is still scarred. "You just look in the mirror.
"Initially, I had a lot of anger inside. Over time, that's dissipated."
"He was supposed to die that day, like the 17 others, but God covered him in prayer," said Bob's wife, Roseann Gomer, who was eight months' pregnant with their first child at the time.
Gomer's son was born three days after he came out of the intensive care unit.
Turner, now 64 and retired, survived the blast without injury. He and some of his companions, who had considered jumping into the cooling waters of the Illinois & Michigan Canal to escape the inferno's heat, walked away from the site that day. The memories stay with him.
"I don't believe you ever completely forget something like that," he said. "It was almost even more frightening when we came back (the next day) because we didn't realize the extent of it."
Dorothy Ostafin, who lived across the street from the refinery for 24 years, was at home with her two small grandchildren when the explosion blew off the front door and buckled the foundation of the two-story house.
Before the explosion, Ostafin and her husband, Stephen, had long resisted the company's offer to buy their property because the couple liked the neighborhood.
"After that," she said, "we thought we'd sell." The couple moved to Lockport.
"I still think about (the workers who were killed)," Dorothy Ostafin said. "You start to remember. But you try not to think about it."
More than 100,000 pages of documents now stored in federal government archives record the lengthy investigation that followed.
A report prepared for the Illinois state fire marshal's office traced the cause of the blast to faulty welding work performed when a section of the tank was replaced in 1974.
The report said a series of cracks formed around the weld, and the pressure eventually split it open, triggering the explosion.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued four citations to the refinery for various safety violations, including a lack of effective emergency procedures.
In a rare action, the Labor Department asked that criminal charges against the oil company and its executives be sought, although they were never prosecuted.
Union Oil and 11 other defendants paid settlements totaling $29.9 million on behalf of 27 people killed or injured in the explosion.
The companies settled a separate suit filed on behalf of the widow of a security guard killed in the explosion.
The refinery, today called Uno-Ven, is operated jointly by affiliates of Unocal Corp.'s Union Oil Co. of California and Petroleos de Venezuela, South America.
Uno-Ven officials have declined to comment on the accident, "out of respect for employees at the plant," a spokesman said.
Gomer, who ended up receiving a $3.6 million settlement as a result of the accident, was in the hospital off and on for several years after the explosion.
He returned to work at the plant two different times, once in the area where the explosion occurred, before eventually retiring.
"Going back, things just weren't the same," he said.
"I think he wanted to prove it was OK (to go back)," said his wife. "I don't think it was OK."
_________________ Telegram Sam wrote: I would cover for SHARK, Drop In, Dave in Champaign, my Mom, and Urlacher's Missing Neck. After that, the list gets pretty thin. There are a few people about whom I would definitely fabricate charges.
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