My name is Jeff Gibson. I work for American Pacific Corporation (AMPAC), apfc.com, in Las Vegas, NV USA (VP, Chief Technical Officer). AMPAC was the parent company to a subsidiary, Pacific Engineering and Production Company of Nevada (PEPCON) located in Henderson, NV USA and is currently the parent company to a division, Western Electrochemical Company (WECCO) located in Cedar City, Utah USA, a manufacturer of ammonium perchlorate and other chemicals. I have worked for AMPAC since June 6, 1988 and my first assignment was to work on the investigation of the May 4, 1988 fire and explosions. I was located at the site (Ground Zero) itself for over two years to support technical and legal teams and also to supervise/complete the environmental remediation of the former plant site in Henderson. I have since moved on to other tasks/areas within AMPAC including the development and marketing of Halotron, a clean fire extinguishing agent replacement for severe ozone depleting halons.
My first task on Wikipedia is to contribute a more first hand perspective to the PEPCON Disaster page while being objective and unbiased. This topic hits very close to home. I have access to the approx. 3000 photos I personally took of the post accident scene between June 1988 and February 1990 with my Nikon 2020 35 mm camera along with more than 8,000 photos taken by others who were affiliated with AMPAC including experts and others. I also have access to dozens of investigation related videos of tests being conducted on the site post 5-4-88, exhibits, witness statements (in writing and original audio), animations, court depositions of key people, and other materials in storage 2 mile from my office in a storage room. There are about 200 banker boxes worth of material. Unfortunately the investigation effort was conducted pre digital photos and pdf's so that only a small portion of the information is available electronically now. Any of it can be accessed, however, if of interest in telling the most appropriate summary of what happened that day. For example, the four photos taken by Richard Askew within 1 mile to the southeast of PEPCON and the three Arthuer Strandberg photos from Kidd Company as the fire spread early on are complementary to the incredible Dennis Todd video. I have personally watched the unedited Dennis Todd video taken from Black Mountain about 300 times and have a second/minute by minute timeline. The audio of the tape is interesting. AMPAC did not obtain the entire unedited tape from Mr. Todd (beyond what NBC and others were showing in clips) until more than 30 days after 5-4-88. I have access to surviving PEPCON employees, several of which are active at AMPAC and some of whom appear in various cable videos on the incident. I was present and coordinated access to former PEPCON employees and associated facts/maps, etc. for several of those cable videos (Discovery Channel, etc). We stopped doing them many years ago because the story has been told so many times and it is very time consuming and disruptive.
Editing this wikipedia site has always been on a to-do list. There are citations to be added. And there are significant errors that need to be corrected because those errors have been propagated by other media. This includes the accurate condition of Bruce Halker, the plant manager and what PEPCON did (or did not do) between the Challenger accident in January, 1986 and May 4, 1988. The cause of the initial fire was never conclusively determined. This is a quite critical point. Objectively, I will submit that this should be noted rather than a categorical statement about welders starting the fire.
My education is a BS in Mathematics from St. Mary's College of CA in 1988.