News - Local News

POSTED: Sunday, Jun. 07, 2009

Pipeline blast changed Bellingham's self-image

BELLINGHAM - It took just a few seconds of fire and smoke to destroy a city's sense of innocence and tranquility.

Stunned residents felt the fear building within them as an unimaginable, unexplainable, churning column of black smoke engulfed the blue sky that June afternoon in 1999.

More than one person compared the sight to the eruption of Mount St. Helens. It looked that big. Hardly anybody really thought it was a volcano, but what else could it be? The terror of the unknown added to the impact. Who knew about the Olympic Pipe Line, the conduit that carries vast quantities of gasoline from Whatcom County oil refineries through Bellingham to the Seattle area?

John Burley, retired city police chief, saw a lot of bad things in the South Pacific with the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II. But he admits he was still scared when hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline from the busted pipeline erupted in Whatcom Creek, a few blocks from his St. Clair Street home.

He was out working in his garden when he heard what sounded like a sonic boom.

"I turned around and, my goodness, smoke was billowing up down there," Burley said.

Unlike many other city residents, Burley knew about the pipeline, but he didn't connect it at first to the shocking sight.

"It scared me, I'll tell you, because I didn't know what it was at first," Burley said. "I thought somebody had set off a bomb or something."

Joe Bates, then a reporter for KVOS television, was driving west on Lakeway Drive back to his office, just minutes before the explosion, when he noticed a police car blocking Woburn Street, which leads toward the creek.

He didn't give it much thought. But by the time he got back to the KVOS office at Liberty and Ellis streets, people were standing in the parking lot, staring open-mouthed toward the north. Bates got out of his car and looked.

"What is this?" he remembers thinking. "We were just frozen. What could this be?"

Bates and crew were soon headed toward the blaze to start coverage of a story that they and other reporters would follow for years.

"As a reporter, you're on two levels," Bates said. "You're covering it because it's a news story, but it's affecting your life."

Mark Asmundson, who was mayor when the blast occurred, said Bellingham was and is a small enough community to feel the disaster and the tragedy on a personal level. Asmundson knew the families of all three of the blast victims, and many others knew at least one of the families stricken.

Bellingham residents like to think of their community as an island of serenity between two bustling cities. That sense of safety was permanently damaged when the pipeline exploded, Asmundson said.

"It made it hard for people to maintain this sense of isolation from danger that people had felt in Bellingham," Asmundson said.

The utterly random nature of the deaths of the three young people in a beloved city park added to the horror: two 10-year-old boys playing in the creek, burned to death but lingering for a day in a Seattle hospital; a teenaged fly-fishing enthusiast, pursuing his quarry in the creek's shady pools and eddies, overcome by gasoline vapors and drowning in the place he loved.

"It's central, it's absolutely beautiful," Asmundson said of the park. "When you go into it, you feel that you have absolutely left the city."

Bates said the horror hit home for him a few days later, after he had to interview Frank and Mary King about the death of their 10-year-old son, Wade.

"I got back into the truck and I couldn't even breathe," Bates said. "I had lost my wife to cancer, and it all came back. That was the moment it came to me. This community has been changed forever. It will never be the same."

Burley said he has relied on advice he got in World War II to get past this and other tragedies in life.

"The captain advised us we would see things we wouldn't appreciate, but life moves on," Burley said. "Don't dwell on it. It's a catastrophe and I feel terrible about the young people who were killed. I think about it but I don't dwell on it. To me that's the only way I can go."