Benjamin Ofori sometimes watched a mush of strawberries and pecans flow into an ice cream tank even after his production line at Blue Bell had been scrubbed.

Low water pressure and temperature hampered Sabien Colvin's cleanup efforts at the plant.

Another employee saw a steady drip, day after day, from a dirty air vent onto Fudge Bombstiks.

They say they all complained to supervisors.

Ofori also groused about a bypassed safety feature on his line. Later, that machine severed three of Colvin's fingers.

In interviews with the Houston Chronicle, more than a dozen former employees of Blue Bell's flagship Brenham plant described a company fighting to keep up with its growing customer base while sanitation and safety slipped. Cleanup workers regularly ran out of hot water, making machinery susceptible to pathogens and allergens. Reused packaging brought grime into the factory. Equipment went without safeguards for years, and several workers lost parts of one or more fingers.

The 14 employees have a combined 213 years of experience on the production lines. Their accounts are bolstered by the limited information reported by the Food and Drug Administration, including details about a contaminated machine that kept cranking out products even as a listeria crisis deepened. They're also backed by an Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation that blasted the company for failing to protect workers.

Blue Bell officials would not agree to an interview to discuss the ex-employees' assessments of their operation. Spokesman Joe Robertson offered a one-paragraph response.

"We are a family at Blue Bell and we have always valued all of our employees and want them to feel safe and enjoy working here," he said via email. "Our employees are our company's greatest asset and many have spent their entire careers with us. Workplace safety, sanitation, and employee training remain our highest priorities as we continuously work to improve."

Blue Bell attained a frozen empire with a story of idyllic country roots, old-fashioned values and quality ingredients.

But since 2010, tainted Blue Bell products sickened at least 13 people, including three who died after being hospitalized with other illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Findings by the FDA and a private laboratory showed sanitation failures at Brenham extended to plants in Oklahoma and Alabama.

Nationwide, regulators and ice cream companies are rethinking long-held assumptions about cleaning and product testing.

Edwin Rogers, a former vehicle operator, started at Blue Bell in 2002 and was laid off in May.

During his tenure, the company added 26 sales and distribution branches in 10 states. In just 13 years, it roughly doubled the reach it had attained in the previous 95, becoming the No. 1 brand in U.S. ice cream sales, based on figures from Euromonitor.

Paul Kruse took over the family business in 2004 and steered it through the explosive growth – and expansions to the Brenham plant - before announcing layoffs in May.

Blue Bell shut down production and destroyed 8 million pounds of ice cream before embarking on a costly, companywide revamp of equipment and procedures. It was too late for Rogers and 1,450 other laid-off employees, too late for Brenham, already reeling from an industrial slowdown.

"Instead of you taking care of this problem," Rogers lamented, "you're adding on to make more money."

'Run, run, run'

Increasing demand led to extraordinary pressures on production. One machine in Brenham - nicknamed Gram - was running virtually 24-7, employees said. That made it hard to clean.

"It was run, run, run," said one worker, who understood that the plant had to keep churning. "But if something's not working right, take the time to fix it ... "

Gram, named for a company that makes ice cream equipment, produced items such as the Country Cookie sandwich and Great Divide Bar. On Jan. 1, according to government records, it made a batch of Great Divide Bars that later tested positive for listeria monocytogenes, the species that makes people sick. On Jan. 20 and 29, it produced tainted batches of Country Cookies.

On Feb. 13, health officials alerted Blue Bell that they had discovered the pathogen in random samples. On Feb. 19 and 21, Blue Bell's own tests discovered L. monocytogenes in drains connected to the freezer on the Gram line. But the company did not change its practices, which had thus far failed to eliminate the bacteria, FDA records show.

On March 9, Blue Bell learned of a potential link between Kansas hospital illnesses and individually packaged ice cream, produced on Gram. On March 10, it stopped using the machine.

Three days later, it issued the first in a line of recalls: everything made on Gram. It later shut down all production on the same floor. Later recalls extended to all plants, as tests isolated listeria on other surfaces and in other products.

Gram was so contaminated that, in its May 22 response to FDA findings, Blue Bell said it would stop using the machine permanently.

Race for time

When Ofori's job operating his half-gallon production line was done each day, he cleaned it, just as dozens of others did during the part of the shift known as washup.

In the industry, cleaning means removing all food debris and residue before the sanitizing step, which kills pathogens.

A critical part of Ofori's work involved cleaning a 200-gallon liquid ice cream mix tank with water and Conquest, a caustic detergent widely used in dairy plants. Conquest instructions call for using water between 150 and 165 degrees, more than hot enough to scald. But throughout his 2009-2012 tenure, Ofori said, there were times the water he used was cool enough to immerse his hand.

There was one hot water source for washup, Ofori and the other employees said, and the heat went to whoever started cleaning first.

"If it ran out, it ran out," he said. "It became a race for time."

He recalled seeing parts that still had an oily sheen of butterfat being placed back on machines. They would be sanitized later by a graveyard crew, but any bacteria lurking in the line had a shield.

"Butterfat acts as a protective agent for the organisms," said Nial Yager, a dairy sanitation expert at Washington State University. "If you don't get the water hot enough to get the butterfat off, it's not going to work."

Documents: See the FDA inspection documents

Twelve employees said they and others complained repeatedly about water temperature and low pressure over the last 10 to 15 years.

Around 2013, the company made changes to the water system in Brenham, but problems persisted, employees said.

Some said that if their lines processed all of their mix early, supervisors would instruct them to add additional mix and produce more, even if it delayed washup.

Workers with the longest tenures said rushing through washup had been a problem for a decade or more. Following the outbreak, the company instituted an eight-hour washup routine. It would not answer questions about its procedures.

Most of the employees interviewed by the Chronicle were granted anonymity, because they are still looking for other jobs or have friends or family working in the plant.

Water, dirt and slime

Another kind of water troubled employees: condensation, dripping from pipes and dirty air vents. In an area known as Vitaline, named for a brand of machine that produces Blue Bell's novelties on sticks, three workers watched water drip onto the products.

FDA reports cited instances of condensation dripping into finished ice cream during inspections in 2009 and 2015, but investigators did not discover the breadth of the problem.

"Every time we had an inspection coming, they would say 'blow on the vent, dry it off,' " one employee said of supervisors. "Once the inspection came, everything then went back to normal."

In one area where employees complained to supervisors and maintenance personnel, they were given a ladder and told to periodically wipe off a wet vent, which was impractical because it dripped at least once a minute, the workers said.

"It was all day, every day," one worker said, until the plant shut down in April.

Vitaline was a source of complaints even from employees in other areas. An expansion that installed a mezzanine above Vitaline stifled the air there, they said, building up even more humidity, which drifted to other parts of the plant, leading to more condensation.

Employees were told there was no solution other than moving the ceiling, "so you just basically have to deal with this problem."

They also had to deal with reused cardboard sleeves. Line workers placed tubs of ice cream into the oblong sleeves, which could then be stacked on pallets and delivered to stores. The cardboard would pick up dirt and debris and carry that back into production areas.

Eleven employees said they were told to throw away damaged or dirty sleeves, but in practice, they were often used until they wore out, even if slimed with ice cream or soaked in condensation.

Blue Bell has said it will discontinue the reuse of cardboard packing sleeves.

The worst grime Ofori witnessed was inside his own machine.

After all parts on the ice cream line had been cleaned and replaced, he ran a final rinse. Occasionally, the mealy goo of ground up "inclusions" like pecans and strawberries would flow back into the tank, and he would have to clean again. Ofori would see the inclusions even on days when his line produced plain vanilla.

"Bells and whistles and flashing alarms should go off right here," Yager said. "If you are getting chunks of inclusions recirculating after the system has been 'cleaned,' you have failed."

"More than listeria, there is a danger of serious allergic reaction from this," he said.

Ofori, like other employees, said raising concerns about such failures generated little but admonitions to mind his own business.

'Be careful'

Colvin started working part-time at Blue Bell in 2008, between seasons playing for the Brenham High School basketball team. He was 16.

He began on the fruit feeder, a job that requires opening a lid and dumping in the inclusions. An auger at the bottom of a vat feeds the food into a rotor with blunt paddles that push the inclusions into the ice cream.

Occasionally, the feeder in Area 2, half-gallon line No. 6, would jam. Sensors set off an alarm and shut down the machine. It could take 45 minutes to isolate the problem and get running again, Ofori said.

But the sensors began triggering false alarms, resulting in repeated stoppages, he said. OSHA investigators found that the sensors had been bypassed. This created another problem: The feeder would spontaneously turn on.

"We communicated it to the cleanup supervisor that this was going to happen again," Ofori said. "He just said, 'Be careful.' "

By 19, Colvin was trained to break down machines for cleaning. He was earning money for his credits at the local community college, on his way toward a public health degree.

On Aug. 11, 2011, Colvin turned off the fruit feeder and inserted his left hand to clear debris. Then it kicked on.

Documents: See the OSHA documents related to Blue Bell

The rotor paddles don't move fast, Ofori said, but spin with incredible torque.

Colvin thought it had just nipped the tip of one finger, but when he pulled his hand out, he saw bone on three fingers.

They couldn't be reattached. Colvin had surgery and spent months in physical therapy, relearning how to pinch washers with his shortened fingers. Doctors told him he would never play guitar again, but today, he is in a college band, strumming away.

'He couldn't say'

Colvin couldn't sue Blue Bell because Texas companies covered by workers' compensation are immune from civil liability for workplace injuries unless gross negligence causes a death.

He got a phone call to the hospital from a manager and $231 a week in workers' comp for four months.

Then he returned to Blue Bell, figuring it was easier to keep working there until he finished at community college. They gave him a job away from the production area.

Ofori said Colvin had been trained not to put his hand in the feeder, but Colvin said he was told to turn off the machine, wash out the debris and then manually check for food particles. Both said the company unfairly blamed Colvin for the accident. Blue Bell had no comment about the incident.

OSHA found that the company had failed Colvin.

It said Blue Bell didn't put guards on moving machine parts and had virtually no lockout-tagout program. On the books since 1989, federal law requires employers to supply locks and tags to cut off power to equipment during maintenance and cleaning.

During an interview with OSHA investigators, production manager Erich Glenewinkel said "he thought that some of the machines had written lockout-tagout procedures, but he'd have to go back and look," a report states.

Glenewinkel didn't even know the machines were supposed to have written procedures, the investigator wrote. Corporate Risk Manager Howard Zuch also told inspectors that "he couldn't say" if he had heard of the requirement.

Only 54 of about 200 production employees were trained on lockout-tagout, OSHA reported. But employees said they couldn't put it to use because they didn't have enough locks or tags. The only safety meeting everyone attended was a few hours each December, they said.

OSHA fined Blue Bell $27,000, negotiated down to $20,000. The company instituted a lockout-tagout program and placed lock stations throughout the plant.

Employees said they wouldn't have those safeguards today had Colvin's parents not complained, triggering the investigation.

There had been a series of accidents at the plant since 2005, according to employees who say they know the injured. A woman lost half of her little finger when it was caught in a chain on a conveyor. The rest of the finger was surgically removed. A man lost the tip of his little finger reaching for dropped product near an unguarded chain below a Vitaline machine. A woman's leg was severely gouged in another moving parts accident.

Nowhere to go

For most of its 108 years, Blue Bell was known for inspiring loyalty in its employees. Vernice Neumann, who lost half a fingertip in a half-gallon lidding machine 30 years ago, harbored no ill will toward Howard and Ed Kruse, the brothers who piloted the company in its second generation. It was her first and only job until she died, said her son, Jay Neumann.

Those who watched conditions decline before getting pink slips after 20- and 30-year careers described a deep sense of loss and powerlessness. Some still made less than $16.48, the national median wage for dairy production jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was a check-to-check lifestyle. But it still was the best-paying blue-collar employer in Washington County, employees said.

"You got a family. You have to weigh your situation," one worker said. "Is it worth me going in and trying to make them do something different and then I lose my job? ... There was a lot I thought wasn't right, but I didn't know nobody I could go to. They own the whole town."

The Kruse name is on streets and buildings, and the Blue Bell name is ubiquitous. The company has donated generously to, it seems, every cause. They also offer employees a 401k and a company-paid pension. Last year, everyone received a 16 percent bonus, with 3 percent going into a stock ownership plan.

Employees said supervisors and the company would help with family emergencies and financial binds.

"I think it hurts me so badly because they've always said we're family, we're going to take care of each other," one worker said. "We pray that Blue Bell does make it, because the community needs it."