Disaster Bellingham

June 10th 1999 by all accounts it was a beautiful late spring Thursday in Bellingham Washington by 4:00 p.m. residents of this seaside community of 65,000 were already home for the day jubilant children recently let out of school were headed to one of the many old-growth shrouded parks and playgrounds near their homes certainly no one had any reason to believe that this community would very soon be turned into the scene of a horrific disaster site and that one beloved Park the community's trust wildlife by the thousands and three Bellingham lives would soon be destroyed Bellingham has several beautiful urban parks and in 1999 Whatcom Falls Park was arguably its finest a genuine 240 acre jewel the park and its old-growth forests and creeks waterfalls and pools were a place of quiet and serene walks on shaded cool trails parents and children came to look at tiny trout in the parks state-run hatchery and bigger kids often repeated the antics of generations of children before them tim wall is with the Bellingham Parks and Recreation Department and has vivid childhood memories of playing in Whatcom Falls Park we didn't have a lot of the trails that we have now we didn't have a community that walked or biked as much but we did we'd go deep into the into the recesses of the gorge as we call it to get away from everybody and to see these incredible waterfalls and in to sit in the water and dive in there was some great girls from importance all up and down a stone bridge at the upper falls on Whatcom Creek is a city icon a beautiful legacy of chucking out sandstone filtering the lingering Great Depression in 1939 the creek itself relinquished occasional trout to skilled anglers and the forested ravines provided secret hiding places for imaginative children also along the creek is the city's only water treatment plant gathering water from Lake Whatcom a few miles upstream at the start of Whatcom Creek downstream the Creek leaves the park and becomes an urban stream in a forested corridor as it twists its way two miles through crowded commercial residential and retail neighborhoods to Bellingham Bay and the sea but on the afternoon of June 10th 1999 things began to unravel in Whatcom Falls Park one of the first individuals in Bellingham to become aware of anything out of the ordinary was Ryan Provencher in 1999 Ryan had been with the Bellingham fire department for two years he was part of an engine company responding to a routine 911 call and a call came in for an odor investigation so though that's a very routine call there was certainly no indication of any sense of urgency or anything out of the ordinary so we responded to the corner there at a Iowan Woburn Street and captain Jake Bush got out to investigate and I was still in the a drug that I was driving and I could see from where I was sitting that his eyes got huge as he looked over the bridge and right then I knew that this was a little bigger than what we thought it was going to be the Bridget Woburn in Iowa Street crosses Whatcom Creek as it spills out of Whatcom Falls Park and heads for downtown Bellingham the routine odor investigation was from calls about a gasoline smell in the vicinity gasoline has a very distinct smell and even a trivial amount of it can release a very strong odor but what the firefighters saw when they look down on the creek as it passed under the bridge was no small amount it looked like a river of gasoline just couldn't couldn't believe what I was seeing I mean it was literally just free-flowing gasoline and the vapors went as high as you could see it just but just blurred the whole landscape behind the creek the vapors were so thick the first responders simple odor investigation had now escalated into a full-scale material spill of enormous proportions it was clearly not a matter of if but rather when the vapors in gasoline would ignite the area needed to be secured the source of the spill located and citizens evacuated from the park more fire and police units were dispatched Ron Morehouse is the fire department's battalion chief and at this point he arrived at the Wolford Street site and established a command center it just seemed inevitable that something was going to happen so my main concern was to get people evacuated and try not to have any of our people in the way at the time there were so many fumes and it was like say normally we get a little bit of a south wind there I just couldn't imagine those that many fumes blowing through that many businesses and households and and of course it right away I didn't know whether it went to the freeway or not the one one thing that was kind of good is that they got whoa burn and Valencia closed right away which are the only bridges until you get to the freeway so there weren't people driving through it but I just didn't believe that we could be so fortunate for there to be that much fumes and product going down the creek and not find an ignition source somewhere by now a growing number of concerned residents were smelling gasoline and calling both nine hundred and kgm I radio to report the odor kgm I radio called the fire departments public information officer bill Boyd to find out what exactly was happening but bill was at home that day and he didn't know about this problem yet I hadn't been made aware of it so I said hang on I'll call you back so I called our dispatch center and they said in fact they had some kind of unknown fuel leak it appeared to be fairly large and that they were going to be shutting down several streets along Iowa and Woburn well that's a big deal because it was coming up on rush hour so I felt like I needed to get that information out to the media so I called back to kgm I they said hang on just a minute we'll put you alive and you can give a report about that time the phone went dead meanwhile in an effort to find out where all this gasoline was coming from firefighters Ryan province and Kelly Devlin were assigned to drive around to the entrance of Whatcom Falls Park evacuate anyone there and see if they could find the source of the fuel spill so he and I jumped in to the aid rig that I was driving we went in to welcome Falls Park and started walking towards the water treatment plant just trying to get an idea of where this was coming from and as we walked you know we would pass by people we'd ask them you know they'd see anything they'd smell anything no no no there was no evidence of anything from the direction that we were coming and we were just crossing the little footbridge towards the water treatment plant when the explosion occurred the flames and smoke came down the valley out of the park and all I remember is it just it completely filled the V of the valley there in the trees and it was above the the fireball was above the trees just a huge boom and then it sounded basically like a jet plane flying through the creek that was just a just a rumbling sound so we definitely were lucky that that we weren't closer than we were all I remember thinking was I thought well you know they're just a there's no product on the creek Camp can't be that much it's just gonna you know burn for a few minutes and then and then it's going to die down and the problem will problem will start going away and I remember it was like 15 or 20 minutes it's still just roaring and I and I I'm just gone like my god what have we got and I just couldn't imagine that there was that much product that it didn't 911 oh there's a big smoke sky is ball game 9-1-1 yes I'd like to report an explosion okay Alabama here 9-1-1 yeah I'm sure you already need recall about a huge fire on Alabama 901 yeah I'm on Iowa's Jeanne I just saw my thoughts on all those people outside right where we are I seen immediately after the explosion the huge black ball of smoke that in both the creeks was visible for miles the sound of the explosion was muffled by the thick forest around the glass site and it wasn't heard throughout the city only those close enough to smell the fumes could know that the towering black roll had anything to do with a burning river of gasoline my neighbor came running down the street screaming saying what's going on in town what's going on in town and I said well if we've got a gas leak and I'm going down to find them she goes no there's something else she goes and look and I turned around and saw this unbelievable wall of boiling smoke rising up straight up in the air and about that time my wife came out and I just basically said del conte coming home tonight I'll see it probably subtag tonight for everyone else including the press the massive column of smoke is a mystery of unguessed origin and the sky was just filled with this black cloud and it was moving as we looked at it from right to left it was moving downstream and because what we'd heard on the scanner earlier we knew that it was the Creek that was blowing up basically we didn't really understand exactly why but we knew that's where the explosion was we couldn't the scanners and those sorts of things stopped working that the police and the fire department people couldn't get through everybody was using their cell phone the phone lines were down power went out in parts of town and it became kind of a scramble to make sure that we could figure out all the things that were happening and why you know I remember being over there and watching the flames and thinking this is unbelievable I just you there are no words when you're watching something like that it was like a blowtorch as the deadly flames and smoke roared downstream consuming hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline that it spilled from somewhere into the creeks property and life alongside the creeks were in immediate peril as the firestorm left the park it entered a residential and heavily commercial area behind Bellingham's Auto Row on Iowa Street beyond that was the freeway and then more residential neighborhood the Civic Center and downtown Bellingham before entering the bay at Georgia Pacific's pulp mill but time and resources were limited the fire was moving like a freight train down the creek in its unchecked advance toward the sea Carl Weimer was the executive director of the restore at the mouth of Whatcom Creek in 1999 growing over the top of Bellingham was this ghastly black cloud that looked like an atomic explosion we all stood there stunned and we turn on the radio trying to figure out what was going on and it took a long time for there to be an announcement that there was fuel in the creek and it was running down Whatcom Creek well we were standing looking right at Whatcom Creek and realized we needed to get out of there we rushed around locked up the store made sure no one was in and then all got out of town and I lived in Ferndale at the time I actually took out to get out of town because I knew enough about air quality issues I was really worried about what was in that cloud as it came back down listening to the radio on the way in the cloud affected me emotionally in a way that I have never been affected before and I actually had to stop my car before I got all the way back to Ferndale and and just stop and get out and breathe because it was such a scary thing seeing that cloud well I was at the Bellingham City Council offices and myself and some other City Council members were picking up our packet for a Monday meeting which we do generally every Thursday and someone came through the council offices and said we need to evacuate the building it was clear as the fire event unfolded that not only emergency services would be called into play but soon important executive decisions would have to be made the mayor Marko's Monson was on a trip in Russia by city charter this place councilman Pat Rowe who was the mayor pro-tem in the city's executive position as we're leaving the building we could actually see the smoke from the City Council outside the city council chambers and it was mentioned to me at that time by one of the other City Council members that listen you're made mayor pro-tem you may be put into action we don't know what it is yet by now emergency officials were becoming acutely aware of where all this gasoline in the creek was actually coming from the only way that we could have that much fuel on the creek is because as was due to a ruptured pipeline originally we thought maybe there was a tank car that overturned up off of Electric Avenue got into the creek and came downstream but it we quickly realized that can't be the case we knew there were two pipelines that cross that crosswalk and Creek one was trans at that time was trans Mountain and the other one at that time was Olympic pipeline and we had representatives from both organizations both companies show up at the scene and the Olympic pipeline person actually was there first and said we think this is our pipeline interestingly enough the Olympic pipeline person that showed up was either a chemist or some kind of employee who lived in the area and was driving home through that area smelled the fuel called back to his office to say you got something going on with the pipeline and they essentially said we're not sure yet we're looking into it and he went you know this has got to be our pipeline and he made contact with our incident commander fairly soon fairly early on in the incident everyone's most dreaded expectations were met when two boys aged 10 Wayde King and Stephen service who were playing together in the park were found horribly burned second and third-degree burns covered 90% of their bodies ambulances were hindered by streets clogged with vehicles and drivers trying to get a closer view of the wall of smoke the boys were able to talk for a while Wade asked that his mother not look at him because he didn't want her upset later a first responder would say that when Stephen asked me if he was going to die I knew the answer was yes but I couldn't tell him the truth all I could say was we're going to take good care of you a third young man Liam wood had just graduated from high school he was an avid fly fisherman and had come to one of his favorite holes in the creek to try his luck Liam was found dead in the creek apparently overcome by thick gasoline fumes when the water turned milky white and the canyon filled with a toxic vapor cloud Liam was overcome by the vapor fell into the creek he loved and drowned the firefighters who treated the two severely injured boys that subsequently died were significantly impacted one of which had shortly thereafter gave up his paramedic certification basically said I can't do this anymore he had a child that was about the same age and just said you know I just I can't do it the other paramedic that was involved he has kept his certification but he was significantly impacted and affected as well we see things in the fire service that knows nobody should have to see we know that when we sign up it takes a special person to deal with it but everybody has their their point at which they struggle with dealing with situations and this was probably one of the most horrific medical situations that we had to face we be in as a fire department and the paramedics and EMTs that responded and helped those kids out gave them the the greatest possible chance of survival but they knew early on there was no way and that's tough to deal with although the gasolene moved all the way down Whatcom Creek to Bellingham Bay for some inexplicable reason the killer fireball itself stopped miraculously at a point in the creek just short of the freeway sparing everything further downstream from the hellish nightmare that had just suffocated and broiled the upper Creek and Earl Steele runs the hatchery at maritime heritage park two miles further downstream from where the fireball stopped we lost approximately 18,000 rainbow trout they were in the hatchery they're just very small fry and so it was a very low number of fish that we actually lost we had just released 1.2 million fall chinook two weeks earlier and it was right around 10,000 pounds of fish but the event was not over yet the fighters continued to rage along the upper Creek and on private property adjacent to the creek and then just as things were settling down about 10:00 p.m. public works reported highly explosive gasoline vapor levels in the sewer system Ron Morehouse remembers the chill that sent down his spine as he began organizing evacuation of a major portion of the city I remember thinking at that point that that I'm going to blow up Bellingham just like Mexico City you know call this gasoline and that in the sewers so we started talking about a plan to evacuate basically the the post office had already evacuated we talked about you know what else are we going to have to evacuate I remembered it reporting a story where the fire chief it did get into the sewer system and there was a bad all the buses lined up to evacuate the entire city and they were worried that the gas was in the sewer system and that it was going to blow up into everybody's bathroom and kitchen and the fire chief they were just about to make the evacuation call when he said let's test it one more time and they put a probe down into a manhole cover and it just started to go down and they called off the evacuation so there was a lot of weird stuff going on and it could have been I mean the whole town could have burned down I remember the look on Dale Brandon's face when I told him we were going to have to evacuate the jail he says I've got 204 inmates and I think three jailers he says we're going to just have to let him open the doors and let him go at that time there were some state officials and national officials safety officials that were coming in they made it there very quickly have a discussion about what was happening and as we were sitting in that meeting everybody was trying to talk about who should do who is in charge of this and who's in charge of that I jumped in and said listen the City of Bellingham is in control tell in control of everything until we decide otherwise and all of the other agencies there from the state and the federal agencies suggested yes that is indeed the case that was a very important thing to get handled and taken care of because now everybody was aware that the City of Bellingham was in charge another major concern was Bellingham's water treatment plant which sits very close to the spot where the Olympic pipeline crosses Whatcom Creek the area was ground zero a crater large enough to hold a truck had been blasted by the explosion here and although the treatment plant itself sustained little damage the pump house was nearly destroyed and temporary pumps were flown in his replacements the damage to the creek and land downstream from this site for two miles was unbelievable it was it was overwhelming to walk through there and and just see the the aftermath it was over very overwhelming and and sad and and just I remember wondering at the time how are we ever going to fix this I would it hit me the strongest was how fast something so precious something that we enjoyed the rocks we sat on that are covered with moss and ferns how fast that took to burn out that was my my main thought was just how quickly we can destroy something by the third day of the event Mayor Mark Osman Singh was back in Bellingham from Russia the first item on his agenda was a tour of the site but I got on site even though it had exploded when I was in Russia when I first came back to Bellingham and which was like 2 and 1/2 days after the election by the time I finally got to Bellingham and got to the site of the explosion behind the water treatment plant the ground was still burning it wasn't smoking it was still in flames and then I walked along the creek and my reaction was holy mother of god what has happened here this is just unimaginable and and then in talking of course to people that were in the vicinity and and physically saw the plume of smoke and stuff I mean these are people will never forget that day and and I'll never forget the sense of determination and resolve I had that we were going to do something about it I think going to the site immediately upon coming to Bellingham it was part of what I don't know if the word is stiffened by spine or I galvanized my determination but it really created a basis for an intensive focus on making change On June 10th 1999 over 230,000 gallons of gasoline were dumped into Hannah and Whatcom creeks as the pipeline's split and dumped fuel unchecked into the waterways the event was not an isolated accident it was caused by a series of problems at Olympic pipeline and its operation and maintenance of its pipeline if any of these problems had been corrected in a timely manner the tragedy would not have occurred at the time thus pipeline blew up here in Bellingham there was no regulation that once you put a pipeline in the ground you ever had to inspect it again and we have pipelines that are 60 70 80 years old in the ground and there was no regulation that said you ever had to inspected again the city had had a franchise agreement with the pipeline company for a number of years which had expired in the early 90s and the city tried to negotiate a new plan I have been basically resisted by the pipeline company so the pipeline company by their own decision was on a month-to-month basis on a franchise agreement and instead of paying at the first of the month they were paying at the end of the mud so technically at the time of the blast they had not paid their franchise fee or out of compliance so there was no agreement for the use of that park property at the time of the explosion which gave mayor Osman s'en some leverage force and Olympic or easement agreement expired we're not going to give you an agreement we want the pipeline shut down until you meet our demands and that's that's kind of the leverage to cooperative agreement that came out of Bellingham they never took it to court to find out how far the mayor could get away with trying to set pipeline regulations that way because Olympic went along and then as the facts came out it was even more clear why this tragedy happened because the because of the negligence of a company as well as the lack of aggressive laws and regulations that gave direction on how we should be testing these pipelines I think one of the ways that Bellingham responded uniquely that you don't see in other places with the disasters like this we really came together to help not only those families but the community in general heal and we stepped up and decided that we're going to take this disaster and turn it into the best we could out of it and I think there was some significant community building and went on because of that both restoring the creeks and really marching on the federal government to change pipeline safety so wouldn't happen to any other community it's tragic that those incidents had to happen to wake up Congress and the pipeline industry for the need for improving our pipeline safety laws but it is a legacy as well for the families that that the pipeline safety laws have have increased because of their continued activism as a result of these tragedies as human beings we have the ability to choose how we are going to react to those bad things and I think the way Bellingham reacted I think the way Bellingham community citizens reacted the way city government reacted and ultimately the way our state and federal legislative bodies reacted created the pot the only positive outcome that you could look for which is a dramatic reduction in the likelihood that such an event will occur again in addition to the work of strengthening local and federal regulation of pipeline safety and restoring the community's sense of safety the city also started work on repairing the overwhelming environmental disaster along the Whatcom Creek corridor that had been destroyed by fire and explosion Claire Foglesong is the city's environmental resources manager and over the course of that first couple of days to a week we realized that everything was dead all the all the insects all the fish any birds that have been in the area all the other aquatic like lampreys and crawfish and things they were just big piles of them all all down the stream where they've collected in Eddie's and that was pretty saddening we still conjure up that sadness pretty easily it was from an ecologist point of view it was pretty devastating to think that a whole stream had been wiped out Claire worked on the city's negotiation team to establish a settlement that would pay for restoring the damaged site and mitigate the loss to the community in that regard he met immediately with negotiators from Olympic pipeline it was really it was very obvious from the beginning they had a lot of practice and that was comforting on one level but discomforting when you thought that they they're used to this and they were sort of entertaining because they had such an attitude that was way too big for the room one of the consultants showed up with a ten gallon hat cowboy hat but they were required to wear hard hats up at the up at the water treatment plant so this was a plastic ten gallon hat it was that met suspects for hard hats and I thought that was pretty entertaining Rene Lacroix is one of the city's environmental coordinators for the past ten years she's been managing restoration projects along Whatcom Creek in the area devastated by the fire because of the settlement the city ended up with a substantial amount of new property and they came to the city as part of the settlement and we also received some settlement money and so between those two we were in a very good position to go in and do some pretty large scale projects there's a group of trustees that helped formulate the restoration plan and they came up with a lot of different project ideas and there were three large-scale projects that resulted from all of that the cemetery Creek project the salmon Park project and the red-tail reach project and both the cemetery creek and the salmon park project were constructed in 2006 and they're both large-scale projects that were meant to increase the salmon habitat available in the wacom creek system the cemetery Creek project remaindered an entire section of Cemetery Creek that had been ditched previously created riffles and pools and bends and meanders and large woody debris we also created three large what we call inline pools there were just pools there were along different stretches of Cemetery Creek and all that contributes to the habitat diversity in the walk in Creek system and then the salmon Park project was allowed the creek to meander into a historic backwater area and that backwater area had been cut off from the main stem of Whatcom Creek from dredging and taking the dredge spoils and putting them in a berm type situation so the creek wasn't allowed to overflow into this old backwater area and so we ended up excavating out part of the berm and then letting the river excavate out the rest of the berm so now it can inundate this old backwater area again great juvenile habitat one of the most amazing things that's that I've seen having a Whatcom Creek is that as a result of the fire a lot of the trees most of the trees right along the stream banks were burned and in that 10 years since then a lot of those trees have fallen into the creek because of the wind and that large woody debris ends up in log jams and that log jams the log jams forced the creek to meander to bend a meander and so for years Watkyn Creek was very straight and had berms on both sides from the dredging and so as a result of the fire and all this wood that had entered the system it now has been zandars and has a much more natural riffle pool ratio and so there's much more habitat available in Whatcom Creek than there ever was even previous to the fire I think you can go to any one place as a as a pedestrian and see the and see things I would go to the to where the north end of Racine Street lets up against the stream there's a bridge there now it's the apex for three big restoration projects it has a totem pole put their a healing pole that was put there by the Lummi tribe and so it's a very special place it's where we staged when we were doing a lot of the restoration work and so it has a lot of meaning for those of us that were involved with that stage of the of the event and now it has a lot of meaning just because of its an access point to the creek I think this pipeline is pretty safe right now I mean there's greater regulations on this pipeline because of agreements with the city of Bellingham than there is on most any other pipeline in the country the pipeline has also been inspected more times than most any other pipeline in the country and we have more valves to prevent these types of things in the future you know you talk to people now in the pipeline world or the oil refinery world this pipelines the safest pipeline in America it's the most monitored pipeline in America I would hope that when something as bad as this happens in our small town you know and we lose three of our young people and lose sort of our sense of security you had some of our public places and that sort of thing that they would remain top of mine but ten years is a long time the the energy that resulted from that the energy in the community that resulted from that explosion and a tragedy and turning that energy into something tangible and concrete like strengthen laws I think is a good example that can be applied anywhere to any set of issues a small town in Northwest Washington that is united and determined can can make a fundamental change in the regulatory environment that affects one of the most powerful and wealthy business interests in the United States that is the oil industry you

Channel: City of Bellingham, Washington

Views: 2,124,860

Rating: 4.6544123 out of 5

Keywords: pipeline disaster, bellingham, explosion, tragedy, disaster, disaster bellingham

Id: 3Ts55dby4og

Length: 35min 39sec (2139 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 10 2014

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In this video, they discuss some of the lessons learned, including how to build the safesst pipeline in the nation. For those downvoting, I encourage you to listen to those impacted.