Eight workers are confirmed dead and three more are missing and presumed dead after a tank holding 900,000 gallons of a caustic industrial chemical imploded at the Nippon Dynawave paper mill in Longview, in southwest Washington, on Tuesday morning. Search teams have shifted from rescue to recovery, and Governor Bob Ferguson said the disaster could prove "the deadliest industrial tragedy in modern Washington state history."
The tank, which held a substance known as white liquor used to break wood chips into pulp, ruptured just after 7.15 a.m. on Tuesday, releasing tens of thousands of gallons of the highly alkaline liquid across the plant. State officials have described it as Washington's deadliest workplace tragedy in ninety-six years, surpassing any single industrial fatality event since the late 1920s.
Of the eight confirmed dead, six bodies have been recovered, one worker died at the scene and another died after being taken to hospital. The three still unaccounted for are presumed to have been killed in the implosion and the chemical release that followed. Among those identified is Gilbert Bernal, 52, an instrument technician who had worked at the mill for more than a decade.
The release also created an environmental emergency. Some of the escaped white liquor reached a storm-drain system that discharges to the Columbia River, prompting water-quality monitoring along a stretch of the river that forms the border between Washington and Oregon. State environmental staff have been sampling downstream and assessing the risk to aquatic life from the sudden influx of a strongly caustic effluent.
Longview, a city of roughly 37,000 people built around its mills, has been shaken by the scale of the loss. The Nippon Dynawave facility is one of the area's largest employers, and the dead and missing are drawn from a tight-knit workforce in which many families have multiple members on the payroll. Local officials have opened a support centre for relatives awaiting news of the missing.
Federal and state workplace-safety regulators have opened investigations into how a tank of that size came to fail catastrophically. White-liquor storage vessels are a standard feature of kraft pulping, and an implosion, rather than an explosion, points investigators toward questions of structural integrity, pressure or vacuum conditions and maintenance history. The company has said it is cooperating with authorities. Findings are expected to take months.