A worker who was badly burned in a Georgia sugar plant blast more than six months ago has died, raising the death toll from the accident to 14.
Malcolm Frazier, who suffered burns covering 85 percent of his body, died on Friday at the Joseph M. Still Burn Center in Augusta, nearly 200 days after he was gravely injured in the Feb. 7 explosion at the Imperial Sugar refinery near Savannah.
“There wasn’t a dry eye on the unit this morning,” said J.R. Shaver, the doctor who tried to revive Frazier when his heart stopped beating. “He’d been close to death many times, but this time he was about as severe as he could be.”
Frazier, 47, of Savannah worked as a floor manager in the refinery’s packing department, which took the brunt of the explosion when sugar dust ignited like gunpowder beneath the refinery’s silos.
A co-worker pulled Frazier, who had worked at the plant for about four months, from the blast wreckage. Suffering deep burns on his face, chest and back, he was among the most seriously injured who survived the explosion.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration last month proposed US$8.7 million in fines against Sugar Land, Texas-based Imperial Sugar. The company is contesting OSHA’s findings.
Other than a few quick trips home to Savannah, Frazier’s parents stayed in Augusta so they could visit him daily and offer him words of comfort and prayer — though most of his last months were spent in a medically induced coma.
Richard Frazier would visit his son’s bedside four times a day, often singing hymns, Shaver said.
The doctor said Frazier seemed to be improving last week. His burns were healing nicely and he came out of sedation enough to make eye contact with his parents, nod his head and gesture with his arms.
By last Monday, doctors discovered Frazier had contracted a potentially deadly blood infection, Shaver said. They managed to revive him after he went into cardiac arrest on Tuesday, he said.
Frazier had survived several infections of the same type previously, but his body could not fight it off this time.
Finally, Frazier’s heart stopped beating and the medical staff turned off the ventilator that had helped him breathe, Shaver said.
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