On the afternoon of June 10, 1999, no one could have imagined that what began as reports of a strong gasoline odor along Whatcom Creek would become a conflagration leading to one of the worst disasters ever to strike Bellingham.
It began with multiple reports from residents and businesses about what appeared to be fuel flowing through the creek, which connects Lake Whatcom with Bellingham Bay.
First responders confirmed copious quantities of gas in the water — and overwhelming fumes. The fire department notified the owner of the pipeline, Olympic Pipe Line Co., which reported that a leak had been detected, and the pipeline shut down.
It was too late. The broken pipe, on the upper creek in Whatcom Falls Park, spewed 7,000 gallons of gasoline a minute into the creek and gushed down the forested canyon toward downtown Bellingham and the Salish Sea.
The vapors were ignited by two young boys with a lighter playing on the creek’s banks. The blaze torched the lush riparian banks, sending up an apocalyptic column of smoke that was visible from Anacortes to Vancouver.
The boys, and a teen, who was fishing upstream, died in the disaster.
The pipeline system carrying interstate liquid fuel runs from Ferndale to Portland, Oregon in a 299-mile corridor. The rupture in the park occurred near Bellingham’s public water treatment facility. Around 226,000 gallons were estimated to have been spilled, according to the Washington Department of Ecology.
The company was later found to be lax in inspection and safety checks and non-compliant in its lease with the city. The incident had national implications and would later spur the strengthening of state and federal pipeline safety regulations. Those laws are now applied to the same pipeline, which continues to move fuel through the city today.
But at the time, the shocking explosion put residents and emergency responders in an emotional tailspin.
An award-winning audio retrospective put together by former KGMI radio reporter Brett Bonner vividly illustrates the chaotic, frightening experience of being on the ground as the disaster unfolded. The recording includes 911 calls, police and fire department communiques, eyewitnesses, KGMI reports from the field and official announcements.
In a 2009 film produced by the City of Bellingham, Ryan Provencher, a firefighter who responded to the odor investigation call, recalled that he was on the footbridge near the water treatment plant in Whatcom Falls Park investigating the source of the gas leak when the explosion happened just downstream.
“It sounded basically like a jet plane flying through the creek bed,” he said.
Provencher said the vapors went “as high as you could see” and were so thick it blurred the landscape behind the creek.
Carl Weimer, then-director of environmental group RE Sources, was at the former RE Store location at the mouth of Whatcom Creek.
“All of a sudden people came running in and said, ‘Downtown Bellingham just exploded,'” Weimer said. “We went outside and looked and it was just like this atomic bomb mushroom cloud rising up over the city.”
In an era before social media, reports of the emergency spread by radio and by word of mouth, but credible details were lacking. One circulating rumor was that a covert moonshine still had exploded in the park.
After closing the RE Store and telling employees to leave, Weimer drove north to his home near Ferndale, but at one point had to get out of the car to calm his shaking legs, he recalled to CDN.
Pipeline failure was revealed
When the real story finally came together, it was grim. Three young lives were lost due to a pipeline failure that could have claimed many more.
Liam Wood, 18, was flyfishing on the creek when he was overcome by noxious fumes and drowned. Wade King and Stephen Tsiorvas, both 10, were playing together on the banks of the creek and ignited the spilled gas with the spark of a depleted butane lighter. They were found and flown to an intensive care burn unit in Seattle, but both died the next day from severe burns.
The explosion leveled a house on Valencia Street and nearly destroyed the city water treatment plant and pump station, but the fire didn’t travel west past Interstate 5; downtown Bellingham escaped unscathed.
A contentious relationship between city officials and residents, and the pipeline company, had already begun.
When Olympic Pipe Line tried to vilify the two boys by implying they had somehow been acting irresponsibly by bringing a lighter to the creek, then-Mayor Mark Asmundson called a press conference and said that had the ignition not taken place when and where it did, damage and death from the disaster would have been much greater.
Skip Williams, Tsiorvas’s stepfather, said Asmundson “nailed it” in his defiant message to the pipeline company.
“He said, ‘I see those two kids as heroes,’” said Williams, a current Bellingham City Council member. “If that hadn’t happened, the gas would have run down the creek, past the car dealerships, past the schools, past low-income housing, past City Hall — it would have wiped out half of the city.”
Williams was focused at the time on taking care of his family in the wake of Tsiorvas’s death, but he saw that a unique situation was developing in Bellingham.
In separate interviews, both Williams and Weimer used the phrase, “it galvanized the community,” speaking to the speed and cohesion of the efforts by the families, government officials, and local leaders to demand accountability from the company responsible, and to shape the future of pipeline safety.
Weimer, who helped organize the citizen group SAFE Bellingham and later became the first director of watchdog and advocacy nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust in the explosion aftermath, said that often the people impacted by such a tragedy tend to “disappear into the background,” wrestling with their grief in private.
Powerful force for good
In Bellingham, the parents of the three youths took a very different tactic — Wood’s mother, Marlene Robinson, and stepfather, Bruce Babec; King’s mother and father, Mary and Frank King; and Tsiorvas’s mother, Katherine Dalen, and stepfather Williams, came together into a powerful force for good.
“So often an accident happens and two weeks later everyone has forgotten about it, nothing comes of it,” Williams said, referring to the short memories of officials and responsible parties after tragedies such as a pipeline disaster that killed 12 people in New Mexico only a year after the Bellingham explosion.
But the boys’ families, along with activists and state and federal officials, fought for pipeline oversight and accident prevention in a dangerously under-regulated industry.
They fought, and they won. Olympic Pipe Line Co. was charged millions in criminal and civil penalties, pipeline improvements, restoration, environmental work, and wrongful death damages.
With the money from the wrongful death settlements, the King family donated to Western Washington University and the Bellingham School District — the elementary school on Yew Street and the WWU recreation center both honor Wade King’s memory.
Wood’s parents started the Liam Wood Flyfishing and River Guardian School, a program that pays homage to their son’s love of flyfishing and one that has expanded beyond the reaches of Bellingham to the Watershed Education Program in Missoula, Montana.
Community volunteers and a host of local, tribal, state and federal entities poured their time and energy into restoring Whatcom Creek. Money from the settlement went to major projects like planting native flora, building trails, installing sculptures and dedicating an overlook at Wayside Park.
With a $4 million endowment from the settlement, the families established Pipeline Safety Trust, which has been committed to action and advocacy ever since.
Twenty-five years after the disaster, much has changed; the Whatcom Creek corridor only shows evidence of the massive destruction if you look closely; pipeline safety reforms remain an issue on the national stage; and the remarkable contributions of the bereaved families are prominent features of the physical and cultural landscape of Bellingham.
“I would never say it was worth it, but at least it led to something good,” Williams said. “We all had to suffer as a family, but the outcome of the tragedy eases a little bit of the pain.”
Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com.
