Worker safety advocate dies after fire pit explodes in her yard, Ohio firefighters say
A backyard fire pit killed an Ohio woman in a horrific accident that’s still under investigation, firefighters told news outlets.
Cynthia Hess, 58, was using her backyard fire pit on the evening of March 10, according to WKRC, when something went wrong. The Deerfield Township Fire Department said after a neighbor called 911, firefighters arrived to find Hess with severe burns on over 90 percent of her body, the outlet reported.
The Deerfield Township Fire Department reported Hess was “consumed by fire,” according to WXIX. She was taken to a local hospital, where she died from her burns the following day. Deerfield Township Fire Chief Patrick Strausbaugh told the outlet there’s no evidence of foul play.
Strausbaugh told WKRC the tragedy was “a pretty traumatic incident for everyone involved.”
The neighbor who called 911 told deputies he heard “an explosion” and saw a plume of thick, black smoke coming from her backyard, WXIX reported. He leapt over a fence to find her burning and tried to extinguish the flames with his hands, according to the outlet.
He lost his voice from screaming for help by the time firefighters arrived, according to WKRC.
Strausbaugh told WXIX that the incident might not have been a “true explosion,” despite the noise the neighbor heard. Instead, the fire might have flared up on Hess.
“It wasn’t like there was a debris field or anything like that,” he said to the outlet.
Tragedy thrust the Hess family into the news once before. Hess lost her 25-year-old son Zachary in 2017, when a 16-foot-deep trench he was working in collapsed, burying him alive, WLWT reported.
The company he worked for was charged with nine Occupational Safety and Health Administration violations after the incident, some of which the company had also been charged with three years earlier, according to the outlet.
Since then, she’d become an outspoken advocate for worker safety, turning her son’s preventable death into a rallying cry, WEWS reported.
“I don’t want him to be a statistic,” she told WLWT in 2018. “I don’t want his death to be in vain.”
Deerfield Township is about a 20-mile drive northeast of Cincinnati.
This story was originally published March 13, 2025 at 10:40 AM with the headline "Worker safety advocate dies after fire pit explodes in her yard, Ohio firefighters say."
