Last week, an explosion at a Kanawha County chemical plant killed one worker, severely burned another and forced thousands of residents to shelter in place.
Last night, about 100 people gathered at West Virginia State University, looking for answers about the explosion at the Bayer CropScience plant – especially this: Why did it take more than an hour for emergency officials to call for residents to shelter in place?
Emergency officials blame plant managers, who refused to tell them what was going on inside the plant.
Company officials weren’t able to defend themselves, because they declined to show up at the community meeting.
Last Thursday night, a few minutes before 10:30 pm, a huge explosion at the Bayer CropScience's plant in Institute rocked houses that were miles away and sent a 100-ft fireball into the air.
Extremely dangerous chemicals are stored at the Bayer CropScience facility in Institute, including MIC, the same chemical that killed more than 3,000 people in 1984, after a leak from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India.
In Institute, only a chain link fence separates the Bayer facility from the state’s only historically-black college, West Virginia State University. Hundreds of people live nearby, and thousands are within a five-mile radius of the plant.
When there’s a chemical leak – especially some kind of explosion – time is crucial. People need to know whether to evacuate or to shelter in place -- turn off their air conditioners, duct tape their windows and stuff towels in their doors.
But almost 15 minutes after the explosion, the Kanawha County Metro 911 Center still hasn’t heard anything from Bayer officials. Finally, someone gets ahold of a worker named Steve at the front gate, according to a recording of 911 calls obtained by the Charleston Gazette:
Dispatcher: Anybody call from the plant yet?
Phone ringing
Steve: Main gate, Steve.
Dispatcher: Hey, this is Metro 911. What do we have, do you know?
Steve: Well, I haven’t got instructions as to what to tell everybody yet. But we just have an emergency alarm in progress right now.
Dispatcher: I’ve got the county emergency services director trying to find something out. Do you know what areas of the plant or anything?
Steve: Well, I can’t give out any information. Like I say, we’ll contact you with the proper information.
At 11:15 pm, almost an hour after the explosion, the 911 dispatcher tries again to get more information out of Steve:
Steve: What it is, we have an emergency at Bayer CropScience plant, and the only information I can give you is that we’ll…and you might want to alert the community, my supervisor informed me to tell you to alert the community there is an emergency in the plant right now.
Dispatcher: Just real quick…we have reports it was in the Larvin unit. Are you able to confirm or deny that?
Steve: No, I’m only allowed to tell you that we have an emergency in the plant.
The response, or lack of it, infuriated Mark Wolford, a long-time firefighter and former public safety director for Kanawha County. He represented the Kanawha County Commission at a community meeting held at West Virginia State.
“What’s going on? The response is, we have an emergency in the facility and I can’t tell you anything more than that. I think everybody in this areas knew they had a heck of an emergency in the facility when they heard the boom and saw the big fireball,” Wolford said.
No one from Bayer attended the meeting. In an e-mail, a company spokesman said that they had no new information to share that hadn’t already been reported in the media.
Some people at the forum, such as Joline Brady of Scott Depot, said Bayer officials should be held responsible – perhaps criminally responsible.
It’s not without precedent. Wolford told of another leak from the Institute facility in 1985, when a company official tried to deny that MIC had leaked from the plant.
“I’m not saying you need to do that to this plant manager,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what: something needs to be done. We need to take some kind of action, when an incident occurs, the information is passed on in a timely manner to the Metro 911 center so we can tell you all what to do.”
With no company officials present, some people at the meeting directed their anger at Andre Higginbotham, an employee at the Bayer plant and chief of the Institute.
One woman criticized his decision not to call a shelter in place – which other county officials ended up calling later:
Higginbotham: I have a choice to make here as incident commander for the town of Institute: Do I call a shelter in place? There was no smell, no odor. We had parameter people going out, checking for odors, and we didn’t have an odor at this time. I was talking to EOC uptown, and I said, it seems pretty safe for the town of Institute, we’re not picking up any odors.
Woman: Based on smell? Based on smell and the wind? This was an explosion. And you felt comfortable in not sheltering, and not evacuating, based on a smell?
Higginbotham: Yes, I felt comfortable.
Third-party gubernatorial candidate Jesse Johnson, who also lives in the area, asked Higginbotham a question that was on a lot of people’s minds: what chemicals were they exposed to? Company officials haven’t been specific, except to say the fire broke out in a tank full of waste products from the production of Larvin, an insecticide that kills bugs and their eggs:
Johnson: What chemicals were released into the atmosphere for this community?
Higginbotham: I’ll let the Bayer officials answer that question.
Johnson: And when will we find out the answer to that question.
Several people at the meeting brought up who else was not there: no one from Governor Joe Manchin’s office, no state legislators, and not even the leadership of West Virginia State University. Here’s Donna Willis, a long-time resident of Institute.
“It doesn’t matter that we’re allowing students from all over the country to apply at West Virginia State University,” Willis said. “And where are you, West Virginia State University? Where are their representatives? To sit up there and say, we’re taking other people’s children’s lives in our hands.”
Willis says the constant orders of shelter-in-place – and the fear of chemical leaks, explosions and other exposure – make her a prisoner in her own home.
“You know, when you imprison a person in jail un-righteously, when they get out, they sue you and they get millions of dollars,” she said.
“I’ve been imprisoned in my house with my children for years. And no one, no one will stand up for me. So year after year, we breathe this stuff in, we make the calls, and we complain and complain and complain, and the company gets, maybe every once in a while, tagged with a money fine, $15,000 for this, $20,000 for that.”
Metro 911 wasn’t the only agency kept in the dark. Company officials at first refused to allow in Mike Dorsey, chief of homeland security and emergency management for the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. He remembers getting in after 3 a.m. – almost five hours after the explosion.
He says the explosion could have been much worse. But it revealed dangerous weaknesses in the current emergency response system.
“It’s absolutely crucial that the private industry and the governmental agencies all be working together,” he said. “And the communications not only between the responders but with the general public need to be improved, so that people can know the true extent of the threat they’re facing.”
There was another theme at this meeting: Déjà vu.
“And it seems like old home week,” Wolford said. “I hate to say this, but 25 years ago, when I had black hair, I was standing here, saying the same thing. And you know what? It’s pitiful. We haven’t got any better. We have not got any better.”
Wolford says the Kanawha County Commission is promising a full investigation into what happened – in case the next time there’s a chemical accident, we’re not so lucky.