Ms. Almazan had lately been working the night shift, which bumped her pay to $12.50 an hour, enough to provide for her two children. On Friday night she said her goodbyes to them as she prepared for work. The sky was darkening above her, and the rain was falling harder. She was not worried. “Just rain,” she told herself.

At about 5:30, a half-hour into her shift, sirens blared over the production line. She hustled to a safe area, packed elbow to elbow with roughly 100 fellow workers, she said in Spanish. They huddled there nervously for a few minutes until supervisors told them to return to their stations. Christmas was coming. There were big orders to fill. But more storms were coming, too.

Elijah Johnson, 20, showed up for work at 6 p.m. He did not understand why supervisors had not canceled the night shift.

As the warning pings of cellphones rang out, he and others asked to leave work. He said his supervisor told him that he had missed too much work already and would lose his job if he left on this night.

“I kept saying, ‘Even with the weather like this we can’t leave?’ and the supervisor kept saying, ‘No,’” Mr. Johnson said. “When more people asked if they could leave, they were told that if they left, there would be consequences. I was told that if I left I would be terminated.”

Bob Ferguson, a spokesman for Mayfield Consumer Products, called the accusation that workers would be fired if they left “totally untrue” and “ridiculous.”

He said that until about a year ago, employees who left their shift early would accumulate points, and could be fired if they racked up enough. But as Covid-19 surged, he said, the company eliminated the points system and allowed workers to start and stop their shifts at will without penalty, something he said employees regularly did.

Shortly after 9 p.m., the sirens went off again. Ms. Almazan turned to a worker next to her and asked if this might mean they would be leaving work early. The woman nodded yes.

Ms. Almazan called her 11-year-old daughter, Cristina Pastor, and told her, “Mija, I’m coming home.” The little girl, hearing the wind slam the walls of her home, asked her if she was OK. “We are OK,” she replied. “We are in a safe room.”

Then came a roar. The factory’s roof peeled off like a piece of paper. The walls collapsed, trapping the workers. Ms. Almazan twisted her face toward a gap in the bricks, trying to breathe. A woman near her who had been crying went quiet, and then went stiff.

“I thought I was going to die soon too,” she said. Her husband and son had been trying to call her. She could hear the phone ring but could not reach it through the rubble. Her family rushed to the site, joining others who had come to find their loved ones.

Six hours later, someone moved the pile above her and a fireman took her hand. The next morning she woke up at a hospital in Paducah. Her head felt like it was being pounded by a bag of hammers.

Days after her ordeal, Ms. Almazan said it was still painful to move her limbs. Sleep was hard to come by. Each time she closed her eyes, she said, she was back under the rubble, hearing those around her scream for help.

“What happened was very difficult to forget,” she said.

Still, Ms. Almazan said, she wished nothing more than to see Las Velas return to Mayfield and employ people like her once again. If the factory reopened, she said she would gladly return.

“I depended on that work,” she said, “and not having it is scary.”

Tariro Mzezewa and Vimal Patel contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.