A look back: July 24, 1981

A Garden City, New York, engineering firm, which designed major renovations to the Hart Metals Company plant in Tamaqua that were completed in 1967, was deemed responsible yesterday for a 1978 explosion which resulted in the death of two local men and serious injury to another.

A federal court jury in Allentown yesterday awarded $815,000 in damages to three plaintiffs in a consolidated suit against the Stone and Webster Engineering Corporation.

Plaintiffs are H. Scott Fetterman of Tamaqua, 19, and unmarried at the time, who was injured, and widows Linda Heffelfinger and Emma Stahler, whose husbands, George Heffelfinger, 36, and Leonard Stahler, 51, died after the explosion.