A woman pulled alive from the rubble of a Pennsylvania chocolate factory after an
explosion that killed seven co-workers says flames had engulfed the building, and her arm, when the floor gave way beneath her. That might have been the end, if she hadn’t fallen into a vat of liquid chocolate.
The dark liquid extinguished her blazing arm, but Patricia Borges wound up breaking her collarbone and both of her heels. She would spend the next nine hours screaming for help and waiting for rescue as firefighters battled the inferno and choppers thumped overhead at the R.M. Palmer Co. factory.
“When I began to burn, I thought it was the end for me,” Borges, 50, told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview from her hospital bed in West Reading, Pennsylvania, just minutes from the chocolate factory where she worked as a machine operator. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board interviewed Borges on Friday, according to her family.
The March 24 blast at R.M. Palmer killed seven of Borges’s co-workers and injured 10.
Federal, state and local investigations are underway. A cause has not been determined, but the federal transportation safety agency has
characterized it as a natural gas explosion.
