The plant on Jones Sausage Road was older than most of the people who worked there. Built after World War II by the Jesse Jones Sausage Company, it passed to General Mills in 1968 and began producing Slim Jims soon after. By the time ConAgra Foods took over in 1998, the 450,000-square-foot factory was the only place on Earth where the spicy meat sticks were made. Nine hundred people worked there. Every gas-station counter in America, every convenience store in every small town, eventually depended on this single building outside Raleigh.

A contractor from Energy Systems Analysts was installing a new industrial water heater that morning. To clear air from the three-inch supply pipe, he opened the valve and let natural gas itself blow through, venting the purged gas straight into the utility room. A fan ran. The crew tried again and again to light the heater. It would not catch. So they kept purging. For two and a half hours, gas flowed into a room where people were working. Some smelled it. Plant personnel knew the work was happening indoors and were using their noses as the warning system. When the concentration finally crossed the explosive threshold, something sparked. The southern end of the plant, where the packing lines ran, came apart in a single hot instant.

The blast collapsed the packing area and tore open the refrigeration system. Anhydrous ammonia, used to keep the meat cold, hissed into the wreckage. Firefighters pushed in anyway; three of them were exposed to the fumes. Search teams worked into the evening once the fires were out. Three workers were crushed and killed in the collapse. A fourth died of his injuries months later. Survivors were taken to the Garner Senior Center to wait, to be counted, to begin the slow work of finding out who had not made it out. Anniversaries since have brought the surviving coworkers back together each June 9, the way grief tends to organize itself around dates.

ConAgra reopened part of the plant six weeks later, then began letting workers go. Three hundred jobs vanished by November. In May 2011, the company shut the factory entirely and moved Slim Jim production to Ohio. ConAgra gave the wrecked site to the town of Garner along with $2.5 million. The town demolished what was left, and an Amazon distribution center rose on the cleared ground. The slogan painted on the old plant's water tower, "Snap into a Slim Jim," was already a relic by then. What stayed in Garner was the memory of a Tuesday morning when a routine job killed four neighbors because nobody had thought venting gas into an occupied building was anything to worry about.