Matthew Balcazar is a man on fire.
He’s upset that his employer, Oregon-based utility giant PacifiCorp, isn’t doing more to help with medical bills and pay for his recovery after a serious accident involving a coal dust combustion fire in late 2022 left him badly burned with scars on his arms, hands and head, and injuries that keep him from performing the electrical work he was trained to do.
“I was an electrician in an underground mine at Genesis Alkali in Green River, Wyoming, and you figured an underground mine would be far more dangerous than a power plant,” said Balcazar in an interview with Cowboy State Daily.
“Some things there (in Genesis Alkali) are dangerous, like checking the roof of the trona mine and making sure everything is stable and, if not, you flag it off,” he said. “But this place at Dave Johnston is far more dangerous. There is fire and things blow up.”
The 34-year-old Balcazar had a string of bad luck and suffered a few setbacks in life before he got hired as an electrical technician at the Dave Johnston coal-fired power plant 6 miles east of Glenrock in late 2022.
Just as the pandemic was shutting down the world in March 2020, Balcazar got laid off from the Genesis Alkali job.
The next day, his brother, Joseph Balcazar, got into a fistfight that spilled into a Las Vegas street, where he was then struck by a pickup. He died of blunt force injuries.
The next few years were tough, going from job-to-job and running into relationship issues and custody battles over a child.
Then came the opportunity to work as an electrical technician at the Dave Johnston plant. He jumped at the opportunity. It paid handsomely.
But things went south quickly — again.
Burned Up
Barely four weeks on the job, Balcazar found himself being airlifted to the burn unit of Swedish Medical Center in Englewood, Colorado, fighting for his life.
The power plant where Balcazar’s accident happened near Glenrock has since been fined for a “serious violation” by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
OSHA issued a $10,419 fine for a “serious” citation for the accident Feb. 10, 2023, with an informal settlement with the utility May 5, 2023. PacifiCorp submitted an “abatement plan” to correct the safety violation that led to Balcazar’s accident.
No details are available from PacifiCorp on how it remedied the situation to prevent future accidents.
Mike Petersen, an OSHA spokesman for the western region in San Francisco, confirmed that PacifiCorp had been cited for a serious workplace violation involving Balcazar almost 18 months ago.
The federal workplace agency defines a serious violation as a workplace hazard that could cause an accident or illness that would most likely result in death or serious physical harm, unless the employer did not know or could not have known of the violation.
Run-ins with OSHA aren’t new for PacifiCorp.
The OSHA records available online include 20 interactions with PacifiCorp dating back to 2016 in Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming, according to Petersen.
Balcazar’s accident is somewhat complicated, but essentially boils down to him becoming severely injured due to a coal dust combustion fire blast happening as he was walking above a silo used to store coal at the 65-year-old plant.
That complex, which may see retirement of the plant’s four units over the next several years, generates 745 megawatts of electricity. Dave Johnston’s four units were built between 1959 and 1972.
PacifiCorp Fesses Up
Balcazar, who spoke with Cowboy State Daily earlier this month about his accident, is now worried.
He has curtailed his conversations with Cowboy State Daily since sharing photos of his accident and what a flash-coal dust fire at the plant did to his body. He’s fearful of retribution by PacifiCorp, which runs Wyoming’s largest electric utility, Rocky Mountain Power, with 144,000 customers.
In the past week, Balcazar deleted his Facebook photos showing his injuries and how the fire has “left a really bad taste in my mouth.”
PacifiCorp, however, isn’t shying away from its responsibilities.
In a statement issued Friday to Cowboy State Daily, the company did not identify Balcazar or another coworker involved in the Nov. 2, 2022, accident, but did say “two Dave Johnston Plant employees” were injured due to coal dust combustion from inside a coal storage silo.
The company also confirmed it was issued an OSHA violation, which depending on severity, could carry a fine of up to $156,259. For this incident, PacifiCorp’s Rocky Mountain Power was fined $10,419 and the company worked with partners in the Wyoming Occupational Health and Safety Administration to implement corrective actions to enhance workplace safety measures.
“Rocky Mountain Power also worked closely with the employees to provide comprehensive support services and compensation during their recovery. The employees have since returned to the plant,” according to the statement.
“Ensuring the safety and well-being of our employees is a core value, embedded in every aspect of the company’s operations,” the company says. “Rocky Mountain Power generation plants have a long history of industry-leading safety performance and continually make efforts to ensure we are improving safety measures.”
The company does not comment on current or past litigation and settlements.
The story of Balcazar’s accident began the morning of Nov. 2, 2022.
Flash Coal Dust Fire
That’s when Balcazar and his partner, who declined to be interviewed for this story and who also suffered burns from the same accident as the one involving Balcazar, were told to install “digital valve controllers,” which are used to regulate large flows of air through air dampers to the massive boilers inside the power plant.
They also were asked to change out a transmitter used to read the level of coal held in silos, Balcazar said.
The electrical work was in line with what Balcazar normally performed.
As an electrical technician, he said he’s done everything from calibrate instruments, change programming for electrical systems, hook up lights and “anything to do with electricity.”
The accident happened as Balcazar and his partner were walking into a huge room, or tripper deck, which is actually a floor above the silos filled to the gills with coal.
The coal is dumped into the silos by way of a conveyor belt that moves the coal, which resemble something akin to a very large water tank.
The tripper deck has a “head pulley” that holds the coal and moves back and forth along rails before dumping the fuel into an individual silo, through grates in the tripper deck.
From the silo, the coal is moved to a mill where the rock is ground into dust and collected for eventual burning.
“When we got there, we looked at the transmitter and made a plan for what we were going to do to change it out, but while we were walking out to go round up our parts and everything, I looked down and in the slot of the floor (where coal is emptied into the silos), I saw a little flame,” Balcazar recalled.
“I then looked at my co-worker and I was like, ‘Hey, is that normal?’ He said it wasn’t, and that’s when — boom! — there was an explosion and a big fireball came out of the floor,” he said. “It felt like an earthquake.”
Balcazar fell to the ground, which was shaking. He hit his head in the fall, causing a huge gash that revealed his skull from his hairline to his eyebrow.
“I remember laying there and thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m burning to death,’ and I was in so much pain,” he said. “The entire room was just engulfed in flames because of the coal dust in the air. It just became a flash fire.”
'Run!'
Balcazar then pulled himself up, grabbed his coworker and yelled to him, “Run!” repeating it over and over again.
“My face was on fire. My hands were on fire, and it all just hurt so bad,” he said.
“I was looking at him (his coworker) and his whole side of his head, his hair, was burned,” he continued. “He had blisters on his face, and his skin was hanging off his fingers. He was just shaking. He just kept repeating, ‘I can’t believe we’re not dead.’”
This is when Balcazar noticed the blood streaming down his face and forming a puddle at his feet.
“I’ve had broken bones before, and there was nothing to compare to how painful and terrifying this was. I thought for sure that we were dead,” he said.
Balcazar and his coworker had difficulty opening a door, making a phone call to the control room to request help, and eventually getting down the three-story elevator from the tripping deck.
When outside the plant, they were flown by helicopter about 260 miles to the south to Swedish Medical Center in the Denver metropolitan area.
“I had a wristwatch on my left wrist, which it melted to. They took me in for surgery, scraped all the skin off my face and hands, my back and arms,” said Balcazar, who stayed at Swedish Medical Center for two weeks recuperating.
He has since had laser surgeries to burn off the scars and endless weeks of physical therapy.
A determination of how the flash fire happened is not completely clear.
However, Balcazar claims that the fire may have begun when compressed air used to clean out the silos created combustion with the coal dust.
“On top of that, there already was some smoldering of the coal dust inside of the silo,” he said. “The reason why the explosion occurred is because the silo had been on fire, on and off for the past month, and they (plant operators) didn’t make sure that it wasn’t on fire anymore before they started cleaning it out. When they blew the compressed air inside the silo, which you’re never supposed to do, that completely violated the company’s procedures.”
Balcazar said the accident could have been prevented at the point where he and his coworker entered the control room before taking an elevator to travel up to the tripping deck area.
“They should have told us that we couldn’t go up there and informed us that these guys were doing a clean out of the silo. But they said that it was OK to go up. That room should have been barricaded off,” Balcazar said.
'It's Just A Matter Of Time'
“There was gross negligence on the company’s part,” he said. “In order to sue them, it has to be pretty much proven that they did this intentionally, otherwise they’re protected by worker’s compensation.”
Balcazar said that he was surprised that the incident wasn’t reported by the media at the time.
“When this all happened, I thought for sure it’d be on the front page of every newspaper or something, but I don’t know, this place is owned by [billionaire] Warren Buffet,” he said. “They just keep all of this stuff under wraps. I’ve worked in dangerous jobs before like in underground mines, but I never worked somewhere where stuff catches on fire.”
Balcazar returned to work Jan. 19, but he’s not performing the same electrical work as before.
He now works behind a computer and monitors emissions at the Dave Johnston plant, though he turned down a position from PacifiCorp to work in his previous role as electrical technician with the Jim Bridger Power Plant in Point of Rocks, roughly 200 miles away from his Casper home.
“After this accident, my hands are messed up and I’m an electrician. I must work with my hands, but I can’t turn things,” he said. “Yesterday, I had to turn wrenches, but my hands were just throbbing all day. Someone is going to end up dying out here. It’s just a matter of time.”
Contact Pat Maio at pat@cowboystatedaily.com
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
