SOUTHERN PINES — About 20 Richmond County residents — including two men who had pulled bodies from the Imperial Foods fire in Hamlet 26 years ago — traded observations and reminiscences Sunday with the author of a new book on the fire.

Author Bryant Simon’s stop at the Country Bookshop was one of the first on his promotional tour for “The Hamlet Fire: The Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Governments and Cheap Lives” to include an audience with personal recollections of the fire on Sept. 3, 1991.

One was Gus Bellamy, who rode the first Rockingham Fire Department engine to Hamlet that day.

“My whole, entire (mission) after that fire was to get people out” of danger, Bellamy said. He and fellow ex-firefighter Frankie Moree sat in the first row of plastic garden and metal fold-up chairs in the back of the bookshop Sunday.

Bellamy told Simon that he developed a “cold” response after the Hamlet fire. He couldn’t treat victims with human warmth, he said. That would slow his responses; he had to remain “cold” to work efficiently.

“That day there, having to deal with all the deaths,” Bellamy said, addressing both Simon and his fellow audience members, “that’s something that we had to learn — to be cold.”

After the fire, he explained, the only thing that could chip away at his emotional defenses was a child in danger; emotions resulting from that, he couldn’t suppress.

Together, Bellamy and Moree remembered the day they rode the engine to Hamlet to pull one body after another from an explosion that had sheared the Imperial plant in half, burning and choking 25 people to death. The fire remains one of the deadliest industrial accidents in American history.

They remembered being fire marshals in different cities after the fire, and finding stores that had removed their fire doors in order to load stock more quickly, endangering their workers in order to expedite profit.

They also remembered with bittersweet irony the meal that awaited them back at the station, when the exhausted and famished men returned from the fire: chicken.

They had to laugh then, the men remembered. What else could they do?

Audience members and Simon agreed that the most lasting effect of the fire had been changes to fire codes, including the imposition of mandatory inspections.

The Hamlet plant had never been inspected by fire officials — no law said it had to be.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture had been at the plant and agreed with the plant owner that many of the doors should be closed and chained shut to keep out flies. It was those locks and chains that later took partial blame for the high body count.

Simon’s book contends that the blame can be spread further — to governments that care more about recruiting businesses than they do for impoverished people forced to work in dangerous conditions, and to a nationwide appetite for cheap and fatty foods that ignores the human cost of its production.

Simon’s book is not a catalog of what went wrong but a story of the people who lost their lives in the fire — from what they had in their pockets that day to what they had hoped to do for their families by working such horrid jobs for a little more money.

One woman in the audience remembered how a fellow recruiter at the local office of the N.C. Division of Employment Security, ignorant of the dangers of working at Imperial Foods, exulted every time he placed a worker there because the plant paid slightly more than similar jobs in the county.

Another, former newspaperman Tom MacCallum, took the only photo in the book. After doing his duty for the Richmond County Daily Journal on the day of the fire, MacCallum — also a firefighter then — helped pull bodies out of the plant.

Those in the room had not done what Simon fears government and “the system” have done — forgotten the human cost of greed and bad policy.

“The Hamlet fire was quickly forgotten,” Simon told his audience. “The kind of forgetting is what ‘the system of cheap’ ultimately depends on.

“If anything, (this) book is an act of remembering.”

Those clutching their own books Sunday didn’t appear to need any reminders.

Simon will make several other appearances at North Carolina bookstores to promote his book.

N.C. Policy Watch also has invited him to speak at a lunchtime forum on Sept. 26. A project of the N.C. Justice Center, Policy Watch brings together government reporters and officials working to ensure economic security for North Carolinians.

Temple University professor Bryant Simon discusses his book “The Hamlet Fire” with an audience of Richmond County readers on Sunday. Many remembered their own connections to the Imperial Foods fire than killed 25 of their neighbors.
https://www.yourdailyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/web1_fireauthor.jpgTemple University professor Bryant Simon discusses his book “The Hamlet Fire” with an audience of Richmond County readers on Sunday. Many remembered their own connections to the Imperial Foods fire than killed 25 of their neighbors.

By Christine S. Carroll

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Reach Christine Carroll at 910-817-2673.