Syd Neville had just put on an extra layer of clothing as he stood at his post operating Eliminator 1, one of the machines in the twin sawmill lines at Babine Forest Products.
It was past 8 p.m. on a bitterly cold Jan. 20. Everyone on B-Shift at Babine Forest Products in Burns Lake had just finished their coffee break.
"I was standing there cleaning up my area after the break, the lights flicked for about half a second, everything seemed to suck in - it's hard to describe, and suddenly the fire came up from below me. I was standing on a steel grate and it blew right up at me," he said.
Those extra layers of cold weather clothing ended up keeping some of the skin on his body.
"It's bizzare what burned and what didn't," he said. "It was like someone turned a tiger torch on me for a few seconds."
Even laying in a hospital bed on a steady morphine drip three days later, Neville was conscious of the ringing still in his head from the "deafening boom" that shook the mill a split second before the fire.
Doctors would later tell him he had second- and third-degree burns to 28 per cent of his body. Skin grafts were tried and failed, so his healing took longer. His wounds were substantial but none made it to his face. He also worried about his hearing, but that, too seems to be alright today.
He remebers seeing stars, in the seconds afterwards, but they were real ones because the roof had blown off.
Not far away, Dirk Weissbach was just getting back to his post when suddenly his feet went out from under him.
"Everything around me fell down," said Weissbach. "A steel frame landed right where I usually stood. The fire came up from below me and I was conked out. Something hit my hard-hat and shattered my helmet. Something from above hit my shoulder and hurt me quite a bit. My eyes closed and when they opened a second later, the mill was gone, just in a blink."
So was the coworker he'd just been talking to.
Weissbach just had a quick conversation with Robert Luggi about when the next break would be, then Luggi went on his way.
It was the last time Weissbach saw his colleague alive.
Luggi and Carl Charlie perished in the blast.
Weissbach was nearly a third fatality. In the seconds after the sawmill exploded, Weissbach called out for help and heard others calling too. He knew there were three exits usually available to his work station but all were blocked. He knew his Line 2 counterpart, Larry Tress, was just a quick walk across the catwalk but the steel connector was gone.
And he had no idea where Tress was.
He contemplated the phone in his pocket, getting a message to his wife Kathleen that he was in his last moments of life, but then thought of her anguish and changed his mind.
He looked for an escape that didn't look more dangerous than staying where he was, but with chunks of building falling and the roar of the fire, staying was not an option.
"You don't feel your pain, you don't feel your burns, the shock produced such an adrenaline rush, you're just moving around to find a way to escape," he said. "I don't know how, but there was a hole in the wall, it must have been blown out in the explosion, but my recollection can't tell me anymore how I actually got out of there. But I remember being somehow outside on the roof of the chip room. It was blown flat, that whole building, but I could step down piles of debris to get away. Once I got clear I just collapsed and then I heard a couple of secondary explosions."
Shane Green was also in shock after the blast, seeing things that didn't make sense.
"I could see the mobile shop and I remember thinking no, that's not possible, you can't see that from here. But the wall was gone, the roof was gone, I could see stuff on the outside."
The explosion threw Green about 15 feet, onto a steel catwalk. While he lay there stunned, the fire came at him sideways, licking him along one side of his body and in the face, leaving him with second-degree burns to 12 per cent of his body.
He was whisked to the Vanderhoof hospital and discharged that night, needing only basic medical attention from then on.
Treatment wasn't so simple for Neville or Weissbach.
Weissbach's wife Kathleen was terrified when she was told her husband had been flown to Vancouver's burn unit.
"You have to redefine your 'normal.' Our normal is now therapy and doctors and nurses and everything you think about after you see that happen," she said. "His medical report was 28 pages long."
His injury list included a broken collarbone and broken ribs, first- and second-degree burns to his face, smoke inhalation, ear damage from the sound of the blast, impact damage to his lungs, back pain from being blown over, a concussion "and now we're going through post-traumatic stress," she said.
Green said he was one of the lucky ones, suffering no ill emotional effects from the memories. Neville too said he was among the lucky.
"I was on morphine, doped up with a smile on my face for a long time, but to hear the guys who weren't hurt - they saw it all," said Neville. "They knew the people inside, they couldn't get to them, just watched it all unfold. The nightmares they are having is amazing to me. I think they have it worse. I hardly remember anything."
One of the results of the blast was an outpouring of affection for Burns Lake from all over the province. Money flowed into a support fund. Controversy erupted over how the money should be handled. Eventually a formula was configured to pay incremental amounts if you were injured, on shift, an employee, indirectly affected, and for special needs. The Weissbachs said they had obtained $12,500 for their ongoing therapies. Neville and Green said they obtained only the base formula amount $2,500.
The two men hurt the worst, Ken Michell and Derek MacDonald, are still receiving regular recovery treatment.
"If Kenny is still hurt in a year, I'm glad there is still an amount of money for him," Neville said. "I'm still on my feet. I have some therapies, and some people have emotional recovery to go through, but Kenny and Derek have circumstances way beyond us. I'm sorry, that's just the truth. Guys like us don't need what guys like that do."
Most of those affected by the blast are now looking for answers.
"When are you going to rebuild? Can I have my job back? If you have a single-line mill after the rebuild, who doesn't get to come back?" Neville asked.
"For me, everything is still on the table," Weissbach said. "People cry about rebuilding the mill, and pressuring the government for timber, but for me, nobody has been held accountable yet. That makes me mad. This could have been prevented, I know that. Whatever went wrong was because of something someone had control over."
An investigation is still underway by WorkSafeBC in conjunction with the BC Safety Authority and the BC Coroners Service. A similar investigation by the same agencies is also ongoing for Lakeland Mills in Prince George, which exploded and burned three months and three days later. It brought back that horrible January night for some Babine employees.
"We actually drove up to the front gates there (Lakeland Mills main entrance) and it was eery how similar it looked," said Neville. "There are a lot of similarities."
