A leaking kettle, a mistaken gasket swap, and an alarm system that never made a sound – those are the failures federal prosecutors say led to a deadly explosion at a Columbus paint plant, and now the company behind it has pleaded guilty in federal court. Yenkin-Majestic Paint Corporation admitted to negligent endangerment for the April 8, 2021 blast at its Columbus facility, which killed press room supervisor Wendell Light and severely injured several other workers.
Light, 44, was the sole fatality of the explosion, and his body was recovered from the facility’s rubble roughly nine hours after the blast, according to a Columbus Division of Fire statement reported by 10TV. The explosion also caused extensive damage to the facility and nearby buildings, per the seed facts of the case detailed by the Tampa Free Press. Yenkin-Majestic used large steel vessels called kettles to heat raw materials during resin production, and the vessel at the center of the disaster, known as Kettle 3, had experienced previous high-pressure spikes before the explosion.
How a Leaking Manway Set the Stage
According to the case details, Yenkin-Majestic installed a new access door, called a manway, on Kettle 3 in December 2020. That newly installed manway began leaking almost immediately. Company personnel mistakenly believed the replacement gasket material was Teflon, when it was actually silicone, and the company attempted to fix the leak with a thicker gasket rather than addressing the underlying problem.
Instead of taking the leaking kettle offline, Yenkin-Majestic kept running it. The company never pressure-tested the newly fabricated manway before returning the vessel to service, and the improperly fitted manway and gasket ultimately failed under the pressure buildup that followed. Federal investigators say the incident was preventable through standard maintenance procedures.
The Midnight Restart That Triggered the Blast
Just before midnight, a Kettle 3 operator restarted the vessel’s agitator without knowing it had stopped running, a stoppage investigators linked to electrical maintenance happening at the site that night. Restarting the agitator caused the resin mixture to rapidly vaporize and sharply increase internal pressure inside the kettle. The failed seal then vented hot liquid resin and flammable solvent vapors onto the plant floor and into neighboring work areas…