NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee has fined an ammunition plant more than $3.1 million for a series of health and safety violations, months after an explosion at the plant killed 16 people and injured others.

The fine is the largest ever issued by the Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency said Wednesday. The explosion last fall at the plant, Accurate Energetic Systems, near rural Bucksnort, Tennessee, leveled an entire building there and shattered the small, tight-knit communities surrounding it.

Accurate Energetic Systems, a longtime employer in the rural part of middle Tennessee, produces explosives for both the military and the blasting industry. During the early morning shift on Oct. 10, workers were making cast boosters, a process that included melting explosives and pouring them into tubes.

Federal investigators have not yet determined what caused the explosion. But in an interim report last month, they said that there were about 24,600 pounds of explosives in the building at the time of the blast. Most of them detonated, razing the building and causing a 1.6 magnitude seismic event that flung debris hundreds of feet away.

“This is one of the deadliest industrial incidents in our country in years,” Steve Owens, the chair of the board overseeing the federal investigation, said last month.

Most of the state fine is for 59 violations classified as “willful,” according to a statement Wednesday. The classification signals either “intentional disregard” for safety and health requirements or “plain indifference to employee safety and health, not malicious intent.”

The violations included failing to document, maintain or put in place certain safety procedures.

Some employees at the plant were not required to wear a face shield while working near kettles full of molten explosive compounds, for example, and the company required only “thin disposable gloves,” when better protection was needed. On at least six occasions in 2025, employees were also overexposed to TNT, the state found.

Previously, the highest penalty issued by the state safety agency was nearly $380,000, after an explosion at a military flare manufacturer killed one person in 2001, the agency said.

Accurate Energetic Systems, which employed about 140 people at the time of the explosion, said it was reviewing the findings.

Wendell Stinson, the company’s CEO, said in a statement that Accurate Energetic Systems believed the findings “do not represent the standard of safety we strive to achieve every day, nor our commitment to the well-being of our team members and their loved ones.”

The company has 20 days to respond to the state findings, whether by speaking with state investigators or filing a formal challenge to the citations and fine.

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is conducting a separate federal investigation.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Emily Cochrane/Austin Anthony
c. 2026 The New York Times Company