‘His eyes were as big as saucers.’ Remembering the Whatcom Creek explosion

"It's not an easy story to tell." That's the way host Chris Morgan introduces a recent episode of his podcast "The Wild." The focus is a terrible accident that occurred 26 years ago, on June 10, 1999, in Bellingham, Washington. The Olympic Pipeline explosion killed three boys and destroyed a large swath of the Whatcom Creek Watershed. KUOW’s Kim Malcolm talked to Morgan about what happened and the recovery process.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: Chris, I know that this place and what happened there are important to you. You can hear the care that you took in this episode. To start, I'd like you to tell us about Ryan Provencher, who arrived that day before the explosion.

Chris Morgan: Ryan was a young 27-year-old rookie with the Bellingham Fire Department back that day, on an otherwise normal, sunny day in June. These panicked calls were coming in, and Ryan was one of the first people on the scene. He talked about arriving that day before the explosion. He said that he looked at his supervisor to get a sense of what was happening there. He couldn't get his head around it, so he turned to his supervisor to try and understand. He told me, “I just remember him looking and just seeing his eyes get as big as saucers."

What was he seeing?

What he was seeing and smelling was something very scary. It was the thick odor and sight of a cloud of high-octane fuel that had come from a pipeline that had burst underground and leaked into the creek. You can just tell from the way he describes it, he took many pauses describing this scene, and you can imagine what it was like for a young firefighter back in the day to see and experience this. Turning to his captain with that reaction, he knew something serious was happening.

Everybody we talked to about that incident that day had the same kind of reaction, that it was something they'll never forget.

And what happened next?

Well, the leak started, and it ended up resulting in about 230,000 gallons of gasoline rushing into the water of the creek, flowing for a mile and a half down the creek. And you can only imagine what that amount of gasoline, that amount of high-octane fuel, the threat that that would face.

Tragically, there were two 10-year-old boys, Wade King and Stephen Tsiorvas. They were playing at the edge of the creek that day, and they had a butane lighter. They flicked the lighter, and the entire creek ignited. Just unimaginable. Both those boys passed away.

The fuel explosion sent black smoke six miles into the air. The scale of it is unimaginable, really. People could see it from a long distance away. I mean, the whole town saw it. Nobody knew what it was to start with. Some people thought a passenger jet had crashed. Others thought Mount Baker had exploded or erupted. And during the course of that explosion, every single living thing in the creek was basically incinerated, for the equivalent of about 13 city blocks. And you can only imagine what it was like.

A local newspaper reporter at the time wrote this line that really stuck with me: “Ash snowed over the silent city, as Bellingham reeled at the loss of three young men, and all the life in Whatcom Creek.”

How did such a terrible accident take place? What went wrong that led to this?

Well, apparently, about five years earlier, contractors were working nearby. They had nicked, dented, the underground pipeline with a backhoe. A 16-inch pipe was dented. It wasn't reported. The stress of that dent sort of built over those five years, and eventually just burst.

As you say, three boys died that day. They included 18-year-old Liam Wood. Can you tell us a bit about Liam?

Liam was an avid fisherman. I learned a lot about Liam during the telling of this story. He sounded like an incredible young guy. He was fishing in his favorite fishing hole in the creek. He was overcome by the initial fumes and died because of them. We talked to Jeff Clark, Liam's English teacher at the time, down at the creek. He’s just a really lovely man. He made Liam just sound like an incredible young man, ahead of his time, thoughtful young kid. He wrote, and he loved life, and he loved fishing.

Chris, your story is in part about the losses, the tragic deaths of three boys and the destruction of this beloved place, the creek, but you also tell a remarkable story of recovery. Before I let you go, tell us about what it took to bring Whatcom Creek back to life.

The community really banded together. It was a tragic time, of course, and people felt it deeply — the loss of three young lives, and the loss of this incredible area, this ecosystem and the nature in it, and it all sort of went together. But the tribes, ecologists, and restoration specialists all came together and began to restore it, which was no small feat.

They had to remove the gasoline. They used these big spider-like machines to agitate the earth and draw the gasoline out. And then they planted hundreds, perhaps thousands, of trees, and they did things like adding gravel to the creek bed to encourage macro invertebrates — the little bugs that then attract the small fish, that attract the larger fish, like salmon— to come back.

One of our guests on the story was Renee LaCroix. She was the head ecologist for the city of Bellingham. She talks about the steps that they took to bring this ecosystem back to life because of the incident. Two-hundred million dollars in the settlement was paid by the pipeline company. Some of those funds went to support the families who had lost their children in the incident. The Pipeline Safety Trust was established, as well. That’s an industry watchdog that tries to ensure that this could never happen again.

So, lots of things came from it. Three pipeline managers went to jail. There was a lot of recourse. The outcomes of this were pretty serious. I just hope that the good things that came from keeping this story alive and keeping the memory alive of the boys will help in the healing process that's still ongoing today, 26 years later.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.

If you want to hear the full Whatcom Creek episode of THE WILD with Chris Morgan, press play below.