Saturday, December 5, 1992
IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH LOVE FLICKERS BUT DOESN'T DIE AFTER LIFE-THREATENING BURNS
Ruth Hurlbut sat in a Paola, Kan., courtroom and squeezed her husband's right hand - what was left of it.
It wasn't much of a hand: a reconstructed thumb swelled to two times normal size and two stubs for fingers. But it was better than his left hand.
For all practical purposes, David Hurlbut didn't have a left hand.
The explosion had seen to that.
It was Friday, April 24, 1992 - four years since David had been burned on the job in a hot asphalt explosion at J&J Metals in Paola.
As she waited for the verdict in their negligence lawsuit against Conoco Oil, Ruth Hurlbut looked into her husband's face and gave him a hang-in-there smile. She was used to the gnarled patchwork of surgical scars and skin grafts that looked back.
The fire from the explosion had seared off David's ears, nose and most of his fingers. It melted his wedding ring and vaporized his hard hat.
As she looked at her husband that day, she recalled the months he spent in the burn unit at the University of Kansas Medical Center and the years he spent recovering at home. She remembered his 27 surgeries and the time she almost left him out of the frustration of dealing with it all.
And she remembered the day he turned to her with a resolute look in his eyes and said: "Ruth, we're going to sue. I don't want us ever to have to suffer again."
And now their hearts were pounding as their eight-week trial inched toward a verdict.
Both sides agreed that there was an explosion in the asphalt dip vat and that David had been burned by it. The question was: What caused the blast?
The Hurlbuts' lawyers argued that a Conoco oil product had "auto-ignited." They said the oil was unreasonably dangerous and not suited for the hot asphalt cooker that had blown up 6 feet in front of David's face.
Conoco argued the blast was a steam explosion, caused when water used to clean the vat had been left in the heating chamber.
All eyes fixed on the jury box. Silently the jury filed in.
The foreman stood up.
Ruth fidgeted in her chair. Sweat beaded on her right hand and she clamped it tightly between her knees.
"Have you reached a verdict?" the judge asked.
"We have, your honor."
The judge turned to Janet England, clerk of the District Court.
"Would you please get the verdict from the foreman," he said, pausing while she complied. "Would you read it, please?"
England unfolded the verdict form and scanned the results. Ruth and David edged forward in their chairs. After a short pause, England's nervous voice quivered through the courtroom with the jury's decision. They awarded Ruth and David $14.5 million. They also gave an additional $3 million to two other plaintiffs.
"Unbelievable!" someone shouted from the front row. "Unbelievable!"
The Accident
Neither Ruth nor David could forget the gloomy winter day that had led them to that moment.
January 20, 1988. A Wednesday.
It was see-your-breath cold in the tiny town of Parker, 25 miles south of Paola. Ruth and David dropped their 16-month-old daughter, Jenny, at her baby sitter's, then drove on to work.
At work, David climbed out of the truck. Ruth, three months pregnant, slid into the driver's seat.
"What a good-looking guy I've got," she thought to herself.
Ruth had always considered David handsome. It was in the way he walked, the blond locks falling to his shoulders, his blue eyes and 3-inch reddish-brown beard.
Ruth watched him as he walked away.
What she didn't see is what happened to him hours later.
It was late afternoon. David's hands were freezing from a long day of moving spiral steel drainage pipe into storage piles. He parked his forklift and entered a steel building known as the "dip house" to warm up. He sat on a wooden stool, his back to a stove. Co-workers John Windisch and Chuck Hoffman stood on either side of a 30-foot-long asphalt dip vat. Steel drainage pipe was dipped in the vat of hot asphalt to coat it so it would last longer.
David looked at his watch: 4:15 p.m.
"Hey, guys," he said. "Let's get our tools picked up. It's about quitting time."
But before he could stand, he heard a boom. Fire rushed over him as if it were shot from a high-pressure sprayer.
David screamed and fell to the floor. The fire licked over his head and hands. He covered his eyes with one arm and groped along the concrete floor with the other.
He took a hot, smoky breath. It burned his throat. He blew it out.
As he stumbled in the darkness, he saw a vision of his Ruth and Jenny.
"Whatever happens, I've got to stay around for them," he thought.
Before he nearly passed out from lack of oxygen, his hand brushed against metal lockers. Suddenly he knew where he was. The door was only a few feet away!
He lurched toward it and struck it wildly with his arm. It opened, and fresh air hit him in the face. He gulped, then dropped to the ground and rolled 50 feet on a sloppy, muddy road.
Friends rushed to his side.
"Go get John and Chuck out of the building," he said.
Frantically they patted David with their gloves to extinguish the fire on his head, hands, shoulders and legs.
"Don't touch me there," he screamed. "It hurts. Go get Ruth!"
Ambulance workers arrived within minutes and took David to Miami County Hospital.
David Hurlbut would live. John and Chuck would not.
Ruth Hurlbut knew nothing of David's burns as she drove to the plant to pick him up. As she drove, she sang along with her favorite country songs.
But on the crest of a hill, about a block from the plant, she stopped singing. Thick black smoke filled the sky. And it was coming from J&J Metals. Worse yet, it was coming from the dip house.
"Oh my gosh," Ruth thought. "That's David's building!"
She was behind three cars.
"Let's go," she yelled. "C'mon!"
Once inside the plant, she ran 30 feet to the office.
"Where's David?" she gasped.
"We don't know," an office employee said. "We're still trying to get a head count."
Ruth trembled as she walked back to the truck. It was time to get Jenny from her baby sitter.
As she was driving out of the plant, she spotted her mother coming up the road and waved her down.
"Go get Jenny," Ruth said, crying. "They don't know where David is. I'm going to stay here."
Just then she saw a black van drive into the plant, and a cold shiver ran down her spine. She had seen the van before. It picked up dead bodies.
"Ruth! Ruth!" someone yelled.
Ruth turned around and saw Todd Attebery, one of David's co-workers, gesturing to her.
"Get in the car," he said. "I'm taking you to see David at the hospital."
"Is he burned pretty bad?" she said.
"Yeah," he said, grasping her hand and squeezing. "It's pretty bad. LifeFlight is on the way."
"Hurry up," Ruth yelled. "Go!"
At the hospital At the emergency room, David was packed in ice and shivering. An oxygen mask obscured his face. It made a strong blowing sound that filled the room.
"Babe, I'm here," Ruth said into her husband's ear. "I love you. You're going to be fine."
"OK," David said through the mask. "OK. I know."
The helicopter arrived a few moments later to take David to the burn unit at the KU Medical Center.
It took 45 minutes for Ruth's mother to drive her to the medical center. It seemed like three hours.
She met David's parents, Ed and Vida Hurlbut, in the waiting room.
"Not another one," she heard them saying. "We can't take another one."
David's twin brother, Darrell, had died in an automobile accident in 1979.
Doctors let Ruth visit David at 9 p.m.
The first thing she saw was his head. It was blood red and swollen to the size of a basketball. The rest of his body was wrapped mummylike in white gauze. A sling elevated his arms. His badly damaged fingers stuck out of the wrappings.
Ruth walked to David's bed to let him know she was there.
He seemed to want something.
Slowly, he took the finger on his right hand and, as if using a pen, wrote out letters on his bandaged arm.
"J-O-H-N-?" he spelled. "C-H-U-C-K-?"
"Do you want to know how they are?" Ruth asked.
Her stomach flipped.
She looked at the nurse, who told her to tell the truth.
"Neither of them made it," she said in an unsteady voice. "Are you OK?"
He nodded his head.
She looked at him: Scared. Burned. Permanently changed.
"I know you're in there, David," she thought. "It's not your fault. I still love you." Coping with a new reality
Ruth spent that night at her sister's house.
"I want you to sleep in my bed with Jenny tonight," her sister, Geralyn Fuerborn, told her.
"OK," Ruth said.
Ruth slid under the covers of the warm waterbed beside her sleeping daughter.
Her sister came back in the room.
"Ruth, how ya doin'?" she asked.
"This just all seems like a nightmare, Geralyn," Ruth said and sighed. "It seems like a big dream and I'm just going to wake up and David is going to walk in your house and everything's going to be all right - like nothing ever happened."
"I know, Ruth," Geralyn said. "I know."
When she woke up the next morning, Ruth realized how real it was. She had to tell her daughter something.
"Jenny," she said, gently stroking her daughter's hair. "Daddy was in an accident last night. He got hurt at work. The doctors are trying to make him better."
She couldn't bear to tell her much else.
The next two months she visited David every day.
David had his first surgery two days after the accident. Doctors peeled the dead skin off his head and replaced it, temporarily, with pig skin.
The next day Ruth talked with plastic surgeon Robert Murphy.
"Ruth, I'm going to be honest with you," he said. "David's had a lot of really bad burns. We consider them to be fourth-degree burns, meaning that he was burned clear to his bones. I've never seen anyone burned this bad live. We'll take it day by day, 24 hours by 24 hours, and see how he does."
"OK," Ruth said in a small voice, looking down at her swelling abdomen. "But will he be out in time to help me have the baby?"
"We can't say, Ruth. We just don't know." Painful progress
A week after the accident, Ruth went to a Saturday night Mass with her mother at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Paola.
She lit a candle and began to pray.
"Dear Jesus," she said, bathed in the light of the flickering candle. "Please don't take David from me. Take care of him and make him well so he can come home to me. Give him the strength to get through all this. And give me the strength to get through it, too. Bless Jenny and my unborn baby and help them to be strong."
After Mass, she returned to her mother and father's house, where she and Jenny stayed while David was in the hospital.
She began working part time and visited David every day. Workers at J&J Metals and Holy Trinity Church collected money for the family. Insurance covered most of David's medical care.
The family also began receiving workman's compensation checks and disability payments.
David would have 27 operations in all, including skin grafts and a nose reconstruction in which doctors had to sew one of his arms to his face for two weeks. The move was necessary to stimulate blood flow needed for nose reconstruction.
Another time doctors put "tissue expanders" in his chest that blew up part of the undamaged skin like a balloon. They then stripped that skin off his chest and put it on his face.
Even on powerful pain pills, David told Ruth, the pain was overwhelming.
In the next several weeks David made slow but steady progress.
One day he surprised Ruth by walking to her from his hospital bed.
"Look at me, hon," he said.
"Oh, David, I'm so proud of you," Ruth said.
She put her arm around him and helped him back to his bed. He was tall and skinny; she was short and very pregnant.
"You two look like Laurel and Hardy," a nurse called.
"Thanks," Ruth said. "Thanks a lot."
After two months David had more than a dozen surgeries. He could walk and talk again.
Ruth decided it was time to introduce Jenny to her "new" father.
She marched cheerfully into the burn unit wearing a big smile. It was the only thing she could think of to mask the dread she felt inside.
"Honey, this is Daddy," she said, wrapping her arms around David.
"Hi. I'm Daddy," David said from behind a badly scarred face. "Hi, Jenny. It's Dad."
Jenny cried and pulled away.
"Get away from him," she said, squirming. "Don't touch him."
Ruth's heart sank. But she continued to smile and touch and hug her husband.
Three visits later things changed.
Ruth placed Jenny on David's bed.
Jenny crawled over to David and touched his face.
Suddenly her eyes brightened.
"You're my daddy," she said.
David smiled.
"That's right, Jenny," David said, relieved. "I'm Daddy."
Later, as the family walked to the cafeteria for ice cream, Jenny scurried excitedly ahead of her parents. As people passed, she smiled and pointed to David and said: "That's my daddy! That's my daddy!"
Exhausting Routine
After nine weeks David went home.
Ruth had the couple's second baby in late June 1988. They named her Lindsey.
David helped Ruth breathe in the delivery room.
But at home, things quickly went from elation to exasperation.
Ruth had to take care of a newborn baby, a mischievous 2-year-old and David, who needed constant care.
Every morning Ruth would bathe him, slather two kinds of ointment on his burns, pull on painful "second skin" garments, dress him, feed him and take him to the bathroom.
It took more than two hours.
"David, is the water warm enough for you?" she asked one morning.
"Yes," he said.
"OK," she said, picking up a special scrubber mitt. "I'm going to scrub your head now."
"Ouch!" he said. "Don't do that! Don't rub so hard!"
"I'm sorry," Ruth said. "I'm sorry!"
During the same time, the couple also experienced a loss of intimacy. David was unable to touch Ruth in the way he had before. He drooled some from his fattened lower lip; kissing wasn't the same. Even holding hands was a new challenge.
Finally it all crashed on Ruth while she was trying to pull up the tight stretch pants of the special suit David wore to flatten his scars.
"You're hurting me," he yelled. "Watch your fingers! If you can't do it right, I'll get somebody else to do it."
Ruth packed a bag and threw it in the car.
She wanted a divorce.
"C'mon, Jenny," she said. "Get in the car."
But the 2-year-old wouldn't come.
David ran over to her.
"You're not leaving," he said. "And you're not taking Lindsey, either.
Ruth and David sat down on the couch and talked.
"David," she said later. "I need to go talk to somebody to help me with my feelings and help me through all this with you. I just can't handle it all."
Ruth visited a counselor. She learned to share her feelings, even if it meant telling David she hated helping him with his burns some days.
Gradually David began doing things for himself. He gained more movement. He helped with the kids. He took his own baths.
The marriage crisis had passed.
The Verdict
August 1988. David Hurlbut turned to face his wife.
"Ruth," he said. "We're going to sue. I don't want this family ever to have to suffer again."
The first law firm they chose worked on the case for a year before saying it couldn't find anything.
They tried a second. That firm, too, held out little hope.
"Ruth and David," said Lynn Johnson, a partner in an Overland Park law firm that eventually filed the suit against Conoco, "we've done a lot of research, a lot of checking. We possibly have five defendants. But there's not a lot of hope. I don't want you to get your hopes up."
But Johnson continued to dig for clues. He fished the exploded vat out of the trash and had experts examine it. He flew up experts from Texas. For the first time, he felt encouraged.
The Hurlbuts filed the suit in 1990, claiming negligence and breach of implied and express warranty against Conoco.
And now they were waiting, holding hands in the Miami County Courthouse, and hoping for a miracle.
The court clerk read the verdict: $14.5 million for Ruth and David, and $3 million total for the widows of David's co-workers who died in the blast. (Conoco has appealed the case to the Kansas Supreme Court.)
Ruth cried, grabbed David and squeezed. Lynn Johnson hugged David. He cried, too.
"Thank you," Ruth said, embracing Johnson. "Unbelievable!" someone else cried. "Wonderful!" "We did it!"
Elated, David and Ruth walked into the hallway to thank the jurors.
"I'd like to give you a hug and thank you," Ruth said, tears in her eyes. "Can I?"
"You sure can," the woman said. "But you better stop your crying 'cause you're going to make me cry, too."
THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Section: STYLE
Page: F1
By JAMES A. FUSSELL, Staff Writer
All content © 1992 THE KANSAS CITY STAR and may not be republished without permission.
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