The first thing Andy Barrientes noticed when he showed up for his shift at RMS Foods on Valentine’s Day, 2005, was the cloud of black smoke emanating from the building. 

A fire had started in the factory around 4:20 p.m., not long before Barrientes was scheduled to clock in as maintenance manager at the food manufacturing plant in southeastern New Mexico. The blaze had caught his coworkers coming off the day shift by surprise; they reported smelling the smoke before seeing the flames. When Barrientes arrived, he saw the staff huddled together at the park across the street. “Everyone was holding hands,” he said. “And we were just … the fire was so big.”

Barrientes had only been working at the factory for a few years. The job was something of an odd one: RMS Foods had once been a …

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