(03-08) 04:00 PDT CONTRA COSTA -- Ernie Pofahl rolled out of bed precisely at 4:45 a.m. on the final day of his life and brewed a pot of coffee. A half-hour later, he woke his wife, Pam, and as dawn filtered through their kitchen window in Antioch they sat quietly together sipping from mugs.

Their talk was that of long-married couples: their little granddaughter's laughter, their approaching anniversary, what was for dinner. And as he headed out the door for his job at the Tosco oil refinery near Martinez at precisely 6 a.m., Pofahl said, ``I love you,'' the same words he told his wife every morning of their 25 years together.

``It was just a normal day,'' Pam Pofahl recalled last week, her voice catching. ``You never expect it would be your last moment together.''

The comforting predictability of Pofahl's life was shattered mere hours later. By early afternoon, Pofahl and three of his Tosco workmates were dead or dying and a fifth was horribly burned by a tremendous fireball that

ignited when naphtha gushed from a pipe they were repairing on a distilling tower.

The February 23 blast was the worst refinery accident in modern Northern California history. And even as its victims were being taken to hospitals, the questions and the anger were mixing with the sorrow and shock.

Sources tell The Chronicle that work crews at the plant knew, more than a week before the explosion, that naphtha, a highly volatile crude oil byproduct, had not been drained from the pipe as safety precautions required. They say that even at the final, fatal moments as Pofahl and his crew were cutting into the pipe that leaked the liquid, supervisors knew the potential for danger was still there.

Tosco spokeswoman Linda Saltzman said she could not comment on details of the accident while investigations are pending.

No one knows whether the explosion was caused by a sloppy safety decision, bad luck or human error. A horde of investigators from Tosco, county, state and federal agencies will spend months trying to figure that out.

The finger-pointing has already begun in earnest, however. And as the refinery is shut down for at least 30 days for safety assessments, the 86-year-old plant's future is in limbo.

As the crude oil distillation tower's lead operator, Creggett had worried every morning since mid-February, when a pinhole leak was detected in one of many pipes snaking down the outside of the tower.

Creggett wanted the high-temperature distilling process shut down while the leak was repaired. He later said managers told him to keep it running.

On February 23, he was trying to help workers drain naphtha -- a hydrocarbon mixture so flammable it ignites by merely flowing onto a hot surface -- from the bottom of the pipe so it could be fixed.

``I was in the process of doing that when I had someone question me and say, `No, we're going to go a different route,' '' Creggett later told reporters.

At least 100 gallons remained in the line. One source told The Chronicle that valves at both the top and bottom of the pipe had failed, allowing naphtha in at one end and blocking its drainage at the other. The stage was set for the tragedy.

Workers labored all morning on the repair job, and after lunch Creggett was about to climb onto the 133-foot tower. But he stayed below for a few minutes to finish a sandwich; that saved his life.

Pofahl had already climbed the scaffold alongside the tower to remove a section of the pipe. On the job with Pofahl were Rollin Blue and Ricardo Enriquez, contract workers with Interstate Scaffolding; Raynold Rodacker, a contract worker with Bigge Crane & Rigging Co.; and pipe fitter Steve Duncan, a fellow Tosco employee.

Someone -- probably Pofahl, his pipe-cutting partner Duncan, or both -- sliced into the naphtha pipe. Suddenly at 12:18 p.m., a shower of liquid cascaded out, drenching the pair and the three other men on the scaffolding.

The naphtha stream splattered onto a hot surface, possibly another pipe, near the ground, and ignited, instantly swelling into a huge ball of flame. The ball roared up the scaffolding, and the five men were trapped in a momentary hell on Earth.

``I was on a cooling tower and saw the thing go -- it was like nothing I'd ever seen before,'' said Mark Anglin, a machinist. ``The fireball just whipped up that tower, and you couldn't even see the guys after it got to them, then it was just flames all over the scaffolding. It was awful.''

Within minutes, sirens tore the air as Tosco rescue workers struggled to reach the four men strewn like broken dolls on the platforms. Duncan had been blown to the ground with broken bones and burns over 50 percent of his body, but the rest were still 30 feet to 100 feet above the ground. To bring them down, rescuers had to pick their way up the tower's honeycomb of pipes, ladders and scaffolding.

``In someone's worst nightmare, they would've had a tough time coming up with a more brutal rescue scenario,'' recalled Aaron Edens, operations manager for American Medical Response, who pulled up to find a forest of fire agencies, helicopters and other ambulances already ringing the tower. `'You're on an elevated platform in a confined space with multiple patients suffering from severe burns. It doesn't get much worse than that.''

Tosco's fire brigade snuffed out the blaze in 20 minutes, but it would take more than two hours to bring the injured men down from the fried column, hose the chemicals off their tortured bodies and load them into ambulances.

Battalion Chief Clark Walker, leader of a highly trained Contra Costa County fire rescue unit, complained that his team was held back an hour before Tosco allowed them to assist as the victims were bundled into stretchers and lowered to the ground by a crane. But even if they had been let in earlier, county officials said, the result would have been the same: four men dead with burns covering most of their bodies.

Enriquez, 36, of Antioch, was killed instantly. Pofahl, 48, died at 6:40 a.m. the next day in a Pinole hospital room with his wife at his side. Blue, 35, of Martinez, died a few hours earlier at a Sacramento hospital; Rodacker, 49, of Martinez, died four days after the blast at a San Pablo hospital.

Duncan, 48, of Livermore, clings to life in Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley.

Last Tuesday, after heated political and community outrage, company officials ordered the plant shut down for at least 30 days, with investigations by several agencies to subject the refinery to the most intensive scrutiny in its history.

Seven workers have died in the past 16 years at Tosco's Avon plant, which also has the distinction of having more air pollution fines and Cal-OSHA citations than any other refinery recently. Tosco bought the 2,300-acre windswept spread of tanks and towers on the eastern edge of Martinez along Suisun Bay in 1976. When the company bought Unocal's West Coast operations in 1997, it took over their refinery in Rodeo. The plants produce gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products.

Tosco Corp., based in Connecticut, has annual revenues of more than $15 billion and, with eight refineries, is the biggest independent oil refiner in the United States. It has a reputation as one of the most cost-cutting, manpower-efficient outfits in its industry -- which makes its stock popular on Wall Street, but makes union leaders at its refineries nervous.

Contra Costa labor representatives have complained for years that Tosco is trimming so many workers and doubling up so many jobs that safety is possibly being jeopardized. The Avon plant has shed 150 employees in the past three years, and a plan to eliminate 70 more jobs was in negotiation before the blast. The cutbacks had become so severe throughout the company that people were complaining at the Rodeo plant that managers even stopped supplying doughnuts at meetings to save a few quarters.

``We have some real concerns about the staffing,'' said Jeff Clark, representative for Local 8-5 of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union, which represents 700 of the approximately 800 workers at Avon. ``They're having operators take on safety inspection work, others doing maintenance work, having everyone work leaner and harder, and we're not fully comfortable with that.''

Many workers have been tense because of the doubling up and the possibility of layoffs. That included several on Pofahl's crew.

``Ernie never was late for work, ever, and usually showed up 20 minutes early -- he liked to work that much,'' said his wife, Pam. ``But with those layoffs coming, he was worried for himself and his buddies, just real nervous. It was like morale there was rock bottom.''

A Vietnam War helicopter door gunner, Pofahl was game for any job they came up with, but as a former Tosco manager -- he had been laid off, then rehired last year -- he was concerned about safety. Enriquez's family said he had the same worry.

``I want to know why my husband, a welder, was being asked to go up on that scaffold to do a pipe fitter's job,'' Pofahl said. ``I just want some answers.''

Blue's sister, Kelley King, said her brother told her that with the cutbacks he was back to doing the hard labor of an entry-level worker, even though he was a qualified foreman. ``That job, that's what pushed him to say it was time to get out,'' she said. ``He was just exhausted when he got home at midnight.''

Over the next weekend, the county Board of Supervisors asked that Tosco voluntarily shut the plant down, and by last Tuesday, Tosco Chief Executive Officer Thomas O'Malley was standing before the board apologizing and fulfilling their request.

``There is no way to justify a horrific event like this,'' O'Malley told the board. ``The loss of human life is never acceptable.''

O'Malley blamed ``human failure'' for the accident, claiming it could have been prevented if crews had been following company policy. He claims they should have shut the unit down just before the fire because naphtha remained in the pipe.

Many workers grumble, mostly privately, that the CEO's contrition may not be all there is to the picture.

O'Malley, who owns a 27,000- square-foot house on a private island off the coast of Connecticut and in 1997 collected $5.6 million in pay from Tosco, has a reputation for slicing things to the bone to maximize profits. He has often said he does this for efficiency and never at the cost of safety or simply to eliminate jobs. But some who labor under him wonder.

``Do you believe his crocodile tears? Not me, for an instant,'' said one worker. ``I think he's intending to shut down the Tosco plant, or at least leave it closed long enough to get more concessions from the union, and that he doesn't care how safe the place is as long as it makes money.'' Union leaders are taking a wait-and-see attitude, but some also are girding themselves for requests for concessions at the very least.

The disastrous fire particularly horrified county residents, where Tosco had been the center of a controversy over refinery oversight laws for more than two years. In early 1997, Tosco and other companies were battling to overturn one ordinance when a hydrocracker unit blew up, killing worker Michael Glanzman.

The so-called ``good neighbor law'' was overturned, replaced by a weaker ordinance that environmentalists now blame partially for the explosion. If Tosco had been required to get permits to do maintenance on the tower in 1997, critics say, the place might never burst into flames.

Already, the lawsuits are beginning. A pipe repairman who was singed in the blast filed the first in Superior Court last week, claiming that the company ignored warnings that could have prevented the explosion.

Alfred Simoni, 33, of Martinez, said he has been traumatized by the burns to his face and the vision of Rodacker, a close friend, and the others being blown away.

``Ernie was in such a good mood that morning, especially considering how tense everyone's been about the possible layoffs,'' said pipe fitter Ralph May, who chatted with Pofahl in the locker room before the job began as Pofahl put on his fire- retardant coveralls, hard hat and assembled his wrenches. ``It just seemed like an ordinary day.

``Now I wonder if any of us who knew those guys can ever have another ordinary day again, after seeing this thing happen.''

Pam Pofahl, 43, is sure she can't. But she will try to keep going.

``On that last morning, we were talking about how, for our 25th wedding anniversary in June, we were finally going to take the honeymoon we always wanted,'' she said softly as she prepared to sort through her husband's belongings last week. ``We were going to go up to Lake Shasta. Our lives were finally together.

``Now I've had to think about workman's comp, a funeral, a will, things I never thought I would have to think about at this age.''

She is focusing on the future: Tending their 3-year-old granddaughter Erica, helping their son, 19-year-old Steven, through college. Getting through each day without crying.

``Ernie always told Steven, `I don't want you doing what I do, being a blue-collar worker like me in a dangerous job. Get a college education, be something.' '' She paused, sighed.