Gas Pipeline Explosion Sends AFSCME Members Into Action
Bellingham, Washington
The call to the Bellingham Fire Department’s dispatch center came in as a routine request to investigate an outdoor odor, but what happened next put members of Bellingham City Employees Local 114 (Council 2) to their biggest challenge.
Don Alderson, a Water Department employee in this city of 160,000 — halfway between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia — called in the report. Before the fire engines even arrived, he called again.
Whatever the smell was, he told dispatchers, it was coming from Whatcom Creek, near his house. Worse, it was sending his dog into seizures, says Fire Department dispatcher Cindy Sleuys.
Sleuys issued an evacuation alert to firefighters who had by now arrived at the creek. It was too late.
Fumes from 277,000 gallons of gasoline that had leaked from a ruptured pipeline exploded in a fireball that burned more than a mile of parkland and claimed the lives of a teenage boy and two 10-year-old boys, whom authorities said set off the explosion by playing with a fireplace lighter.
Alderson’s home was destroyed, but he survived, unhurt.
“He pretty much lost everything but the clothes he was wearing and his dog,” recalls Street Department worker Keith Smith.
Sleuys, the most senior of six dispatchers in the room at the time, stayed at her post to direct emergency personnel. Two hours elapsed before she knew whether her husband, a fireman she had dispatched to the scene, was alive.
AFSCME members throughout the city rushed to respond to the emergency. The explosion nearly destroyed the city’s wastewater treatment plant, which serves about 70,000 people, so restoring power to the plant was necessary to prevent a more widespread disaster from exposure to contaminated water.
“At one time, we were down to a foot-and-a-half in one of the reservoirs [about an hour’s supply, or less],” says Chuck Berlemann, a maintenance technician with the Public Works Department.
“This is when it got scary,” he says of the work. Gasoline, which had leaked into the drain system, could have exploded.
Power was finally restored to the pumps, water pressure was raised and a localized disaster — as bad as it was — was kept from turning into a city-wide catastrophe.
