A former maintenance worker says he once used a garden hose to prevent a potential explosion at the Tennessee bomb factory that was obliterated Friday in a mystery blast that likely killed 16 people.
Greg McRee, 44, was hailed a hero in 2020 after dousing flames shooting from an industrial chimney at Accurate Energetic Systems (AES).
His quick thinking, according to colleagues, stopped the fire from reaching a nearby stockpile of TNT boosters and blowing the building sky high.
But instead of being rewarded, McRee says he was dismissed days later from his $28-an-hour supervisor job at the sprawling munitions plant in McEwen, 70 miles west of Nashville.
‘On Friday afternoon I was a hero. On Monday morning I was told I was a piece of c**p and a failure,’ the married dad-of-three told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview.
‘By Wednesday I had been terminated. It was wrong.’
The exact same building – known as the Melt Pour – was the epicenter of a devastating blast last week that left 16 workers missing and shook homes and businesses within a 20-mile radius.
Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis warned Saturday there was virtually zero chance of locating survivors among the smoldering ruins.
Satellite images from before and after the explosion clearly show how the bomb factory, known as the Melt Pour, was completely decimated by the explosion
Greg Mcree was hailed a hero in 2020 after he prevented a fire at the Tennessee bomb factory he worked at from spreading, but he was fired just days later
Authorities are identifying the dead from DNA, Davis said, adding: ‘It’s a tremendous loss, a great loss.
McRee was friendly with several of the workers who likely perished in the disaster which is being investigated by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
‘What can you say or do to make it better, nothing,’ he said. ‘I feel terrible for the families.’
McRee had been a maintenance supervisor at AES for nine months when fire broke out in an evaporator room adjoining the Melt Pour on October 30, 2020.
The building was being used for the manufacture of cast booster canisters, which are high-energy primers used to set off bigger explosives in mining or demolition.
To make any excess explosive material that spilled on to the factory floor less volatile, it was sprayed with water which drained into the evaporator, he explained.
‘The purpose of the evaporator is to get rid of the water. They reclaim and reuse the explosive material,’ said McRee. ‘That machine can run to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.’
McRee arrived on the scene to see flames flickering from a plywood roof close to the evaporator’s chimney.
Smoke from the blast last week that likely killed 16 people could be seen for miles
‘It was a very dry October. The chimney got hot. There was wood within probably four inches of that pipe and it was dried out enough to catch fire,’ he recalled.
McRee decided to tackle the fire because it was limited to the plywood frame and wasn’t close to any explosives.
‘I felt I could control it with a garden hose. Just a regular sprayer nozzle. I just kept spraying it at the flames,’ he went on.
‘It was very smoky but I managed to stop it from spreading until the firefighters arrived on scene within 15 minutes.’
Had the flames spread to the boiler or ignited the stacks of boosters waiting to be stored in an underground bunker, the effect could have been catastrophic.
‘It would have leveled the building. Same thing that happened to the building the other day,’ said McRee of Pinewood, Tennessee.
By the following week, however, he had been fired.
AES claimed McRee ignored warning notices posted throughout the 1,300-acre facility, reading ‘do not fight explosive fires’.
The evaporator which caught fire in 2020 before McRee put it out was reportedly filthy and had not been properly cleaned
An internal disciplinary report obtained by Daily Mail blamed the accident on a ‘lack of preventative maintenance and poor housekeeping on the evaporator’.
‘These types of negligent and unsafe actions are unacceptable in the explosive industry,’ it read.
McRee disputed the findings, however, and insisted he was made a scapegoat. ‘The evaporator itself never caught fire. Someone had built a building out of wood that should not have been a wood structure,’ he said.
‘They demolished the entire evaporator building in about three days so I don’t know how well it was investigated. They self-investigate a lot down there.’
A second maintenance worker, James Creech, 78, was fired for not cleaning the evaporator properly. But Creech denied any responsibility for the fire and sued AES for age discrimination, saying they used it as a pretext to dismiss him for being ‘too old and slow.’
His suit blamed ‘deficiencies of the building and/or building materials’ for the near-miss incident.
Creech said he was unable to discuss the terms of a confidential settlement he reached with the company, which manufactures industrial explosives and supplies claymores and mines to the US military.
But he told Daily Mail: ‘Greg put the fire out with a garden hose all by himself.
Court disclosure documents included a file from Accute Energetic Systems that said they fired James Creech for not cleaning the evaporator properly
‘He was covered in soot and ashes. He was a hero. He saved that building.’
A co-worker named Jimmy Sugg also came to the defense of his fired colleagues in a statement provided to Creech’s lawyer during the case.
‘If a true investigation had been performed it would had been discovered that the exhaust stack was run out of the plywood decked roof during the installation and the exhaust stack temperature ran around 900 degrees which should had been the contributing factor for this building catching on fire,’ Sugg wrote.
‘Why wouldn’t this had been looked into and questioned? Why wasn’t the one that installed the evaporator disciplined? Why did the Safety Manager not do the investigation on this incident?’
Daily Mail has reached out to AES, founded in 1980, for comment.
It said in a previous statement that Friday’s explosion was under ‘active investigation’.
‘Our thoughts and prayers are with the families, coworkers, and community members affected by this incident,’ the statement read.
‘We extend our gratitude to all first responders who continue to work tirelessly under difficult conditions. We will provide updates as more verified information becomes available.’
Comments are closed.