Janice Miller of Fayette, Sherrica McGruder, far left, and Angela Doss, center, wait in the hallway of the Mississippi Firefighters Memorial Burn Center to see burn victim Walter Doss Jr., McGruder’s cousin and Doss’ brother. Putting on dressings for the visit is Alfred Harrison’s wife, Rosa Harrison, second from right, and mother, Mary Moore.(The Vicksburg Post/MELANIE DUNCAN)

[05/20/02]GREENVILLE Tywayne Croskey’s heartbeat races when family members talk to the Port Gibson 24-year-old, one of the 12 victims of Thursday’s explosion and fire at a rubber-recycling plant in Vicksburg.

“He’s doing better than he was,” his sister-in-law Janice Miller of Fayette said Sunday afternoon at the Mississippi Firefighters Memorial Burn Center in Greenville.

While Croskey was, like some of the other six moved to Greenville, “paralyzed” by the sedative he was being given, he was able to hear, Miller said.

“The nurse told us, Keep talking to him, he can hear you,'” Miller said. “His heartbeat races higher when we talk to him,” she said she could see from Croskey’s bedside heart monitor.

“His whole body is bandaged, including his head,” said Croskey’s first cousin, Ladorsha Eaddy. “You can see half of his nose and his mouth. He has tubes in his mouth. You can’t see his eyes.”

Croskey was one of the two in the initial airlift, which arrived about 9 p.m. Thursday.

Most of the workers in the regional burn center from the fire at Rouse Polymerics International Inc. remained bandaged head-to-toe Sunday and unable to speak from sedation, said family members who visited them.

Several seemed to show improvement, family members said, but by this morning the conditions of all but one were again listed as critical, the level where they all began on arrival, center spokesman Robby Scucchi said. The condition of Walter Doss Jr., 28, of Vicksburg, was upgraded to good, he said.

At River Region Medical Center in Vicksburg, Lee Greer, 49, of Port Gibson, was discharged Sunday, and Eli Williams, 35, of Vicksburg, was moved out of intensive care, hospital spokesman Keith Mason said. Patrick Rader, 29, of Vicksburg, remained critically stable there, he said.

The workers were brought here, four by helicopter, Thursday night and Friday morning after an explosion at the plant on U.S. 61 South. The blast and subsequent fires killed one man, C. Theodore “Teddy” Smith, 40, of Vicksburg, and injured 11. Scucchi said several arrived with extremely large second- and third-degree burns.

On Sunday afternoon, for the third day, family and friends crowded the waiting area and front steps during afternoon visiting hours at the critical-care facility beside Delta Regional Medical Center. At its peak, the group numbered about 60.

A bedroom in the next-door Light House Lodge, for families of center patients, accompanies each of the 16 center beds, Scucchi said. In several cases, Rouse was providing hotel rooms for additional family members, they said.

The visitors had to “suit up” in masks, caps, gowns and shoe protectors and take turns to see patients.

Roy Deaton, 50, of Vicksburg, a maintenance man at the plant, also arrived in the initial airlift. His wife, Martha Deaton, said his blood pressure was stable and most of the rubber and soot he inhaled during the fire was out of his lungs, but that he was burned over virtually his whole body.

“The only places that weren’t burned were his toes and the bottom of his feet,” she said. A strong antibiotic and the strongest pain-relieving drug available were being administered, she said.

“He has no skin so they’re going to have to get donations of people that will match his skin” for grafting, Deaton said.

“They’re all heavily sedated,” she said of the Rouse patients. “They don’t want them to get up or they might try to yank (tubes or bandages) off,” she said.

Thelma Mae Rankin of Union Church, grandmother of George Stewart, 33, of Fayette, an eight-year Rouse employee and the supervisor during Thursday’s 3:30 p.m.-to-midnight shift, visited him Sunday.

“They took the medicine off, and he’s breathing on his own,” she said.

Three doctors, Robert Love Jr., Robert Love III and Lawrence George, are treating the seven, Scucchi said. Family members praised the doctors and the center’s staff.

“The doctors are keeping us informed,” said Sharon Davenport, the wife of eight-year employee John Davenport, 27, of Vicksburg. “They’re telling us what we need to know.”

“We think each and every last one of them has done a nice job, and in Vicksburg (at River Region Medical Center) too,” Miller said.

“God bless each and every last one of them.”

In Vicksburg, Fire Chief Keith Rogers said he would be continuing the investigation today into the cause of the fire and that local and state investigators, who ruled it an accident, would turn the investigation over to federal authorities.

“There’s a high possibility that there was a chain reaction of three events,” Rogers said, the third being “an ignition of airborne rubber dust” that caused the fire to sweep the entire 60,000-square-foot building.

He said Sunday evening that the fire was out and his department was “just now pulling all the trucks away.” He added that “very minor hot spots” could still flare up, and that one truck would continue to keep an hourly watch on the plant.