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Smoke & Mirrors

Authorities spoke too soon when they said the ChemCentral fire was safe.

By Eric Barton 

The ChemCentral fire began with just a simple chemical reaction. Workers had poured a lubricant called Indopol from one container to another. Indopol isn't known for simply exploding out of nowhere. But for some unknown reason, it sent a fireball hurtling through the plant. Workers barely got out of the way of the blast. One got singed on the leg, but ChemCentral's employees avoided being consumed by a ball of flame.

The fire was immediately dramatic. It spread quickly to a railroad car full of chemicals. ChemCentral is owned by a multinational company that makes and distributes thousands of industrial chemicals, so dozens of highly toxic compounds were on-site that day. The blaze spread to a tanker truck. Several tanks caught fire. Each time the fire hit a new vat of chemicals, it exploded again. As it spread, it sent a towering cone of smoke into the sky. The cloud was as black as coal, and, as it hit the higher atmosphere, the winter breeze carried it straight toward downtown. It looked frightening, as though a severe tornado-alley thunderstorm had suddenly formed in otherwise clear skies. It passed over the residential neighborhood of Columbus Park, and as it did, the cloud rained down hot ash and debris.

Firefighters at Station P34 got the call just after 2 p.m. on February 8. They arrived first, but there was little anyone could do. Captain Lisa Malloy ordered her crew to help the evacuation of ChemCentral's employees. Malloy immediately radioed headquarters to ring a second alarm. Battalion 104 arrived as backup. They had no hope of putting out the fire, so the firefighters fell back into defensive positions. With her crew amped on adrenaline, Malloy ordered a "no screaming mode" to keep radios from getting jammed with panicky calls.

Soon, many downtown workers were either glued to live TV coverage or staring out their windows at the approaching cloud. Among the buildings in the path of the cloud was the Environmental Protection Agency's downtown office.

The EPA sent an environmental scientist named Mike Davis to collect samples at the scene. Janice Kroon, an on-scene coordinator for the EPA, stayed behind to field phone calls and to direct the agency's staff.

Like the firefighters, the EPA could do little. The smoke was drifting straight up, hundreds of feet into the air, and wind currents were carrying it southwest. It was impossible for Davis to get close enough to the raging fire to take samples directly from the cloud. The EPA relied instead on five air-quality monitors that it has stationed around Kansas City.

But the air monitors, which measure smog and pollution, can't detect the kind of chemicals that could have been traveling in the cloud.

During a fire, it's the EPA's policy to give firefighters all the latitude they need to protect lives. Kansas City Fire Chief Smokey Dyer took command, overseeing representatives of six government agencies including the EPA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

All around the city, people were wondering what was in the cloud of smoke. Dyer took control of that, too. He began assuring the media about the safety of the air, even though nobody had any idea what was really in the cloud. "None of these are what those of us in the field would call exotic chemicals," the fire chief told the Associated Press. "None of these have a high rating for toxicity." Dyer continued his assurances to the TV news: "Every indicator we have is that the air is safe — we don't know of any problems."

Dyer suggested that downtown workers and residents shouldn't worry about debris falling from the sky or the ominous cloud now drifting among the high rises. By early evening, cars and homes in Columbus Park and in parts of downtown had become coated with ash. Large pieces of debris, like roofing tiles and something that looked like Styrofoam, were dropping into yards and onto homes. It was unlikely, Dyer said, that anything falling was dangerous.

But Dyer and the federal authorities had no proof to back up these claims. This is made clear in internal EPA and Kansas City Fire Department documents the Pitch obtained through requests for records.

The EPA says lengthy testing after the fire shows that the smoke and debris weren't dangerous. But according to the hundreds of pages of reports and e-mails, officials told the public that everything was safe long before those results were in.

Authorities used the smog detectors as the basis to give the all-clear, but EPA officials knew that the smog indicators couldn't be used to make that determination. The EPA says testing that night found that the cloud did not contain harmful chemicals, but those results did not come in until the following morning — long after the public had been told that the cloud was safe.

As for the debris, testing on the ash and larger chunks didn't begin until the following day. And when it did, scientists found that there may have been traces of toxic chemicals in some ash samples.

Officials also claimed that no water ran off from the plant, but now they acknowledge that thousands of gallons of potentially tainted water ended up in sewer systems, which ultimately flow into the Missouri River.

Recently, the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined ChemCentral a combined $560,260 for shoddy record keeping and failing to maintain safety standards at the plant. ChemCentral failed to notify the EPA of a deadly chemical kept there, the EPA claims, which could have hampered firefighters' ability to fight the blaze.

But in the six months since the fire, federal and local authorities have failed to address their own mistakes.

About an hour after the ChemCentral explosion, a twin-engine plane took off from a small airstrip in Waxahachie, Texas. The ASPECT (Airborne Spectral Photometric Collection Technology) plane was the EPA's best tool to determine whether the cloud was carrying deadly gasses across downtown.

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