Charlie Morecraft was 33 years old when an oil refinery fire burned half his skin off. He spent most of the next five years in hospitals enduring miserable pain and endless operations. He missed his daughters’ growing up and lost his wife.
But unlike many of the other victims he met along the way, Morecraft came out of it with his sanity and physical health relatively intact. Now he travels the continent telling his story to workers, many of whom may have the same casual attitude towards safety that got him into trouble.
Last Tuesday, May 18, Morecraft spoke to about 160 people at The Gathering Place in Slave Lake. Brought to town by the sponsorship of several dozen local companies, he pulled no punches in advocating the need for safety. You are not doing it for the company, he said.
“Safety is personal,” Morecraft said. “It’s about your family.”
Morecraft said that for his first 15 years at a New York area Exxon refinery, safety was “no major concern,” for him. Like most of the guys he worked with, he thought accidents happened to other people, not him. He knew every shortcut in the book, and used most of them whenever management wasn’t looking. Being known as a “wimp” or a “management suck” was not where it was at.
Then one day Morecraft was sent to remove a ‘blank’ (a metal plug of sorts) from a pipeline carrying a highly flammable liquid. It was a job he had done hundreds of times before, without problems, not counting the leaking that sometimes happened. The company knew about the leaks, and had a policy for avoiding them. Needless to say, Morecraft the corner-cutter paid no attention to the procedure, because he’d done the job so many times the easy way without any problem.
But this time was different. A jet of fuel sprayed out in his face, temporarily blinding him. Of course he had no safety glasses on.
“I never bothered to wear them if I could get away with it,” he said.
It took him a few seconds to clear his eyes so he could see. In that time, volatile fumes from the leak were drifting around. Morecraft set out running for the nearest shower. As he passed his truck, he realized he’d left it running.
That was about as far as he got before the explosion that blew some of his clothes off and set him on fire. His arms (the sleeves of his fire-retardant suit were rolled up) and face got it the worst. Months of treatment, therapy and operations followed.
“I’ve had more operations than Michael Jackson,” he jokes.
Morecraft eventually returned to work at the same plant, but as a safety officer. He wasn’t any good at it until one day he told his story. He’s been doing it ever since.
“What caused this accident?” Morecraft asked his audience. “My attitude towards safety. If you have the same attitude, sooner or later it will happen to you.”
Morecraft talked of the accident victims he’d met in hospitals. Many had similar stories with regard to attitudes about safety. The drunk driver who ended up a quadriplegic, the person who didn’t wear a seatbelt because nothing had ever happened before and seatbelts are uncomfortable.
“Safety equipment is uncomfortable? Getting around for the rest of your life with one of those wheelchairs you have to drive with your chin – that’s uncomfortable!”

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