Story by Gretchen Mae Stone
The State Journal
INSTITUTE
September 07, 2008 04:59 pm
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At a community forum Thursday night, communications problems and the chemical MIC surfaced as the greatest concerns among local citizens frightened by the Aug. 28 Bayer CropSciences chemical plant explosion that killed one Bayer employee and injured another.
County officials and first responders, however, told different stories about how they were communicating as the accident played out.
“Regardless of what they say, the only calls we got (from Bayer) said they had an emergency in the place,” said Mark Wolford, a former city emergency services director who was representing the Kanawha County Commission.
Wolford said the company would not provide any further information to the Emergency Operations Center in the first hours after the accident. He said Bayer was commanding the incident but didn’t make the first contact after the incident.
A St. Albans shift commander from a policing agency made the first call at 10:35 p.m. Aug. 28.
The outside incident commander, however, said he did have immediate information about what had exploded and where. It was his decision to forgo a shelter-in-place order because he believed the are was safe. Another incident commander inside the plant was relaying information to him.
“From the time the problem came in, within 15 minutes I was on the scene at the plant,” said Andre Higginbotham, chief of the Institute Volunteer Fire Department. “I came up to the main gate, immediately I asked the guard … ‘What do we have? Where’s the fire?’
“He said, ‘It’s in the Larvin unit,’ he identified that. … The first vital information that we asked for was is MIC or has any dangerous tanks been compromised … ? No was the immediate answer.”
Higginbotham also works for Bayer but was not working that night. He has been on the VFD for 20 years and has been chief for 10 years. He said his experience led him to decide the surrounding town was safe from any chemicals that had been released.
He said the fire was producing only black carbon, and so he felt the town of Institute was in no danger.
A shelter-in-place order was initiated at 11:27 p.m. by Dale Petry, director for emergency services for Kanawha County, according to David Erwin, county Emergency Operations Center coordinator.
Kanawha County and city officials will meet with first responders and Bayer CropScience officials Sept. 11 to critique the company and county reaction after the explosion.
Bayer CropScience employee Barry Withrow died in the explosion, and employee Bill Oxley suffered injuries and was taken to the West Penn Hospital burn unit in Pittsburgh. Both men had worked at the plant for more than 20 years.
The community forum Sept. 4 was hosted by People Concerned About MIC, a group formed after MIC was released in Institute in 1985. MIC is methyl isocyanate, a toxic chemical used in the production of pesticides. A 1984 MIC leak in Bhopal, India, killed 3,800 people and affected the health of 170,000 survivors, according to the EPA’s Web site. Both the Bhopal and Institute plants were owned by Union Carbide at the time of those incidents.
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