Spring/Summer 2000 One Year Later

Spring/Summer 2000 - One Year Later

One Year Later
by Skye Thompson

For many in Bellingham the memory is stark and unforgettable: a towering wall of black smoke churning skyward with volcanic fervency. The column expanded from within itself, an infinite origami cloud blossoming six miles high. The explosion, caused by a burst gasoline pipeline, cast a heavy shadow over the entire region.

Now, one year later, our community is still working to make emotional and ecological sense of the blast.

From the air, Whatcom Creek resembles a hiking trail, a fluid path for aquatic life to travel between Lake Whatcom and the Pacific Ocean. The vibrancy of life in the stream is evident each fall when the ocean sends hundreds of salmon spawning up the stream. In the spring, thousands of smolt follow their instincts and their heritage down the watery path to the sea.

The lake sits above Bellingham like an upstairs pool, a natural water tower providing clean water with strong pressure for a town built below it on seaside tidal flats. The creek pours out of the lake, down slope onto the flats and into the salty water of the bay.

Unlike many urban places, Bellingham hasn’t covered all its waterways with city streets. In fact, much of Whatcom Creek is open and accessible and some stretches are even celebrated as city parks.

Celebrating Whatcom Creek is appropriate because it has been the centerpiece of Bellingham since the town’s beginning. Using the stream’s rushing energy to power their sawmill, Bellingham’s first settlers milled lumber out of the surrounding forest. From those planks Bellingham was born.

That was the early 1850s. Since then, Bellingham’s connection to the creek hasn’t diminished, but it has changed. Locals today covet the lake and its outlet stream for clean water and natural beauty. So when a ruptured pipeline high on the staircase pumped 229,950 gallons of gasoline into the creek, public faith in the sanctity of the park evaporated.

It was 3:30 p.m. The broken pipe — a steel, 16-inch high-pressure line — spewed forth 7,000 gallons of gasoline per minute, more than 100 gallons each second. Quickly the creek turned yellow, and a curtain of vaporous fumes closed over the stream.

Liam Wood was flyfishing on the bank of the stream when that curtain enveloped him. He was a gifted nature writer and passionate flyfisherman. When the gas came, Liam couldn’t escape. He collapsed and drowned in the stream.

If the leak had poured into a swimming pool the size of a football field the gas would have been 9 inches deep.

But the gas didn’t spill into a giant swimming pool. Instead it gushed down the narrow slot canyon of Whatcom Creek, flowing in a continuous stream more than three miles to the bay. And as the gas evaporated and fumes accumulated, the creek and the surrounding forest became explosive. The winding stream became a bomb fuse.

Wade King and Stephen Tsiorvas were playing outside. Wade, a Mariners fan, was the catcher for his baseball team. Stephen sang in the school choir and liked to skateboard and swim. It was the beginning of summer and naturally these two 10 year olds had mischief on their minds. But Stephen and Wade were smart. They knew that playing with fire could be dangerous, so just before 5 p.m. the boys took their butane lighter to the safest place imaginable, the lush bank of nearby Whatcom Creek.

When the vapors ignited, a gargantuan fireball exploded around the boys. A torrent of fire raced upstream toward the leak and downstream toward the city. The two fireballs rolled like MAC Trucks through the riparian vegetation of the streambed, searing huge evergreen trees white and limbless. Where pockets of the yellow fluid pooled, massive explosions clapped like thunder, each concussion sending tremors through the city.

The gasoline burned for about an hour. Before the fire quit, it had raised a curtain of black smoke 1.5 miles wide and 6 miles high. As the sun set, breezes toppled the sooty tower and white ash fell like snow upon the city. A brown translucent film hung in the air, and through it the evening sky looked almost green, a nauseating oil slick upon the dying sun.

Stunned, the city sank immediately into mourning. The greasy brown haze that hung in the air also hung in our hearts. Quiet depression suppressed the community and for days people remained speechless.

In the ensuing year, Bellingham has begun to grapple with its grief. These first steps have been the hardest. When a sudden emotional vacancy is as large as one’s child or as stark as a landscape wasted by fire, the task of recovery is daunting.

But Bellingham is pulling through. Progress here has been like the response of spring in a landscape emerging from deep exaggerated winter. The green of new life has infiltrated an otherwise colorless panorama.

So too has been people’s emotional response. The spirit and emotion suppressed by the fire is returning. For many people, taking these first steps has meant volunteering time and energy toward helping others.

Levels of community involvement have been high. In October, on Make A Difference Day, 642 volunteers ages 5 to 75 donated 2,823 hours or service in more than 40 projects around Whatcom County. More than 120 volunteers planted trees and cleaned up Whatcom Creek.

This type of support is the foundation for both emotional regrowth and ecological recovery: People connecting with people and establishing new relationships through cooperative support. Like the roots of a tree, community can provide broad and stable support in times of hardship. As a community, the people of Bellingham have empathetically held up those who have lost the most.

Upon this substructure of support, families who lost children have become leaders in our community and nation. Their energy and articulate advocacy for safer pipelines and renewed ecosystems have become the voice of Bellingham and the basis of a broad national movement for increased pipeline regulation.

By speaking to Congress, the ball player’s father fights for tangible meaning in his son’s death.

By restoring the creek, the fisherman’s mother restores a place where her son’s spirit can endure and play. His spirit was happiest there in life, perhaps it will be happiest there after life as well.

The positive connections we share make us who we are. The fabric of our community is made from the threads woven through it. Strangely, many of these threads aren’t discovered until a crisis occurs. When tragedy laid bare the inner matrix of our community cloth, new seams were built to hem that rip. This process pulled us even more tightly together and strengthened our community.

Most importantly, the personal connections established in the pipeline crisis are a place for us to remember those we lost. However they are memorialized, wherever they come to rest, the spirits of Bellingham’s lost sons live within each of us.

Spring/Summer 2000 - One Year Later

One Year Later by Skye Thompson

One Year Later
by Skye Thompson