At 5:48 a.m. on November 5, 2019, an employee was working for a trucking firm that hauled refined fuel products. He was pumping fuel from a portable tank back into his tanker truck by top-loading (e.g. SPLASH FILLING). The fuel involved was a mixture of gasoline and diesel fuel (both NON-conductive flammable liquids). The employee was on top of the pump truck checking tank Number 3 when vapor from tank Number 3 flashed into flames. The employee caught on fire, and he was thrown from the top of the truck. The fire then spread to tank Number 4, which was open. Vapors in Tank Number 4 ignited. An explosion followed; this explosion ruptured the side of tank Number 4 (see photo). Ignited fuel from tank Number 4 then spilled out onto the employee, saturating him with fuel. He sustained third-degree burns to his face and hands and second-degree burns on the rest of his body. He was killed.
PLEASE NOTE that the news media reported this incident incorrectly. He was not refueling the business’s trucks, rather he was there to recover this fuel mixture. I am not sure why this business (reported to be an appliance business) would have a gasoline/diesel mixture, except maybe a delivery error. In these video’s we can see the small white above-ground tank next to the truck (we can see the vent pipe sticking up). I am assuming he was trying to pump the tank contents into his truck via an open hatch on top. He may have been the one that made the delivery error and pumped the wrong fuel into the wrong tank and he was trying to correct his mistake by removing the fuel mixture and putting it in an empty tank on his truck. I have a FOIA in with the Pheonix FD and State Fire Mashal for hopes we can better understand just what happened.