Recovery crews on Friday afternoon retrieved the body of another worker who died in Tuesday’s Longview paper mill chemical rupture. That brings the confirmed death toll at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Co. to nine, with two more people still missing and presumed dead.
The effort to recover those final victims of the worst industrial accident Washington state has seen in a century could be slow and challenging, Matt Amos, Longview Fire battalion chief, said Friday.
Crews have been able to bring vacuum trucks and hundreds of feet of hose to the scene to remove liquid and were able to move hundreds of feet deeper into the site, where a 900,000-gallon vat of a caustic chemical known as “white liquor” was stored for use in paper making, Amos said. And air quality readings at the site have improved.
But searchers are maintaining a distance around the massive ruptured tank, which may still contain tens of thousands of gallons of the corrosive liquid.
“It’s a lot of precision work,” Amos said. “It does continue to be incredibly difficult to everyone working the scene.”
As they search for the remains of the two still-missing people, crews are also trying to preserve evidence for investigations that will begin once the recovery effort concludes, Amos said. With limited access to some damaged areas of the mill, officials were not able to estimate how much longer the search will continue.
As recovery efforts continue, state and federal environmental agencies have been working with Longview officials to respond to the environmental consequences of a chemical release that killed fish in dikes near Nippon Dynawave and briefly led to elevated pH levels in the Columbia River earlier in the week.
Environmental response
Drinking water in Longview remains safe, Longview Public Works Director Chris Collins said, adding that flushing out ditches near the city’s groundwater wells has been a top priority and pH levels in those ditches are now at normal levels.
But chemical levels are still high in a small number of other ditches, and the water may appear darker in these areas, said Brooks Stanfield, federal on-scene coordinator with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
People should avoid those ditches and should not try to retrieve dead fish that might have been killed by the chemical spill, said Courtney Sherad, on-scene coordinator with the Washington Department of Ecology.
Environmental responders have recovered 23 fish from ditches so far, and are aware of other dead fish they cannot retrieve because of steep and slippery slopes. Members of the public should not try to touch or collect any dead fish or other animals they find affected by the chemical spill, and should instead report what they see to wildlife officials, Sherad said.
“We have not observed any dead fish in the Columbia River,” she said. “Right now is a time when chinook salmon are traveling upriver, and we have worked to mitigate impacts that might affect our wildlife that depend on the Columbia.”
Though white liquor is extremely caustic — it’s used to turn wood into pulp — it becomes harmless as it mixes with natural acids in the environment. Diluting it by flushing out dikes and ditches will minimize the long-term environmental damage it could cause, officials said.
That effort has been helped with water diverted from the nearby Cowlitz River, and now crews are beginning to pump water from Lake Sacagawea, a man-made lake that runs the length of a beloved Longview city park.
People can expect to see water levels drop at the lake in the coming week as the city continues to draw its water down for flushing efforts, said Collins.
Some clean-up efforts have started at the Nippon Dynawave site to help recovery workers access more areas. Once the final missing workers are recovered, the site clean-up will accelerate, EPA’s Stanfield said.
Investigation will follow recovery effort
Officials are also preparing for the next stage in an investigation into what went wrong, which will intensify once the remains of anyone killed have been removed.
When investigators are able to access the full scene, they’ll be entering an industrial site criss-crossed by powerlines and heavy equipment and mangled by the damage caused on Tuesday.
Several walls were blown out by the chemical release and equipment was heavily damaged, Brian Wood, support services director at Nippon, said Friday. The closest views of damage near the tank have come from drone images, and it is not clear how long it will be before officials gain more direct access.
“We are very much in early days,” Wood said.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
