Al Kidd’s first sign of a problem was the strong, acrid smell that burned his nose. He was busy taking another acid number at the end of a long overnight shift overseeing production of a long-oil alkyd. He had been a little sleepy five minutes earlier, but the smell seeping into the small production lab jolted his senses, and he was now wide awake. The pungent odor seemed to be coming from the other side of the plant floor. He looked in the direction of the odor and saw white smoke billowing from the large staging platform that made up part of the acrylic production area. He dropped the small erlenmeyer flask holding the acid number solution and ran through the door of the lab and into the main plant area toward the smoke.
Al was on the second floor of the oldest section of the plant. The area was scattered with high-temperature alkyd reactors ranging in size and material construction. Some were large workhorse systems of over 5,000 gallons, used in making many of the commodity resins that Big Time Paint sold to domestic coatings manufacturers. Though housekeeping was very important and stressed to every manufacturing employee, the concrete floors were black and sticky from years of resin manufacture. Sometimes your shoes made the sound of pulled clear tape often heard during the Christmas wrapping season. The plant smelled of burnt oils and rosins. In this section were two more modern, stainless steel reactors used in manufacturing smaller batches of emulsion polymers. Polly Mertz, Al’s colleague, planned to use one of these new emulsion reactors later that day.