Relatives of two of the five men killed in a tunnel near the Georgetown hydroelectric plant Tuesday are questioning safety practices at the job site.
The family of Anthony Aguirre, 19, of Mira Loma, Calif., told The Denver Post on Thursday that the day before the accident his job supervisor told the crew not to go into the tunnel where they later died. But on the day of the accident, the instructions changed.
The family of of Donald Dejaynes, 43, of Sun City, Ca., questioned Thursday why there weren’t stairs or some sort of ladder in the tunnel the men had been ordered to work in.
“I’m surprised there were no escapes, no ladders,” said Dora Hollowell, Dejaynes’ aunt. “How are they going to climb up a contrete wall? If there were some ladders, they could have gotten out.”
Xcel Energy operates the plant and had contracted with RPI Coating Inc. of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., to apply an epoxy and paint mixture to the inside of the tunnel.
Officials have speculated that the painters were having trouble with a sprayer clogging, so they added solvent to the epoxy in a hopper used to keep it warm. Inadvertently, the hopper’s heater turned on and a spark ignited the vapors.
There were 11 men in the crew. Four were below the fire and two were outside. Those six survived.
It took rescuers 2-1/2 hours to lower scuba-style air tanks and masks to the five men left in the smoke-filled tunnel. They had run from the fire until they reached a point where the tunnel became too steep to climb.
The other men who died were Dupree Holt, 37; James St. Peters, 52; and Gary Foster, 48. They are all from California.
Xcel Energy spokeswoman Ethnie Groves said Thursday company officials are cooperating with investigators and couldn’t comment on the issue of the stairs or whether RPI employees were warned the tunnel was unsafe prior to the fire.
“I can’t get into any specifics,” she said.
RPI officials did not return several phone calls Thursday.
“To lose (Dejaynes) like this is almost too much,” Hollowell said.
Since learning that her nephew was killed, Hollowell said she has been tormented by mental images of him futilely running up the slippery tunnel floor.
“All kinds of things are going through my mind,” she said. “Did he have to suffer?”
She said her nephew moved in with his disabled father last spring after his mother died of brain cancer on Mother’s Day weekend.
“He used to take his dad to the golf course so he could get out,” Hollowell said. “His priority was his father and his wife.”
Dejaynes’ aunt Angie Hollowell said several family members have worked together as spray-paint workers. Even co-workers become very close because they often do out-of-town jobs on weekdays and only return home on the weekends, she said.
The best friend of Angie Hollowell’s son is Anthony Aguirre, another of the men who died.
His family said Thursday that a day before the accident, the contractors were told that the pipeline was not safe and that they would not be going down to do the work.
“At first they weren’t going to do it because it was not safe to go down there,” said Aguirre’s sister Yolanda. “I don’t know why they decided to go down there the second day.”
Aguirre’s mother had a feeling her son was one of the men trapped when she saw the accident on television. She was too distraught to be interviewed in Mira Loma, Calif.
Aguirre’s grandmother, Connie Hernandez, spoke for her daughter, and said she doesn’t understand why her grandson died.
“We don’t know why they sent them down there,” she said. “It was the first time he was doing that type of work.”
Aguirre’s sister said her brother usually painted water tanks that were above ground and had never gone into an underground pipeline before.
The week before the accident, Aguirre had been switched from working the night shift to the day shift, his family said. For some reason, his schedule changed to the morning the day he died.
Hernandez said RPI, the company that employed her grandson, was going to pay to send his body back to California. She said they also told her that they would be paying some funeral expenses.
Aguirre’s fiancé, Patricia Valenzuela, 19, left Denver on Tuesday morning after spending the weekend with him and found out about the accident when she returned to California.
She said Aguirre was planning to give her a ring on a cruise when he returned from Colorado.
“He told me, ‘I even know what I am going to wear,'” Valenzuela said. “I told him, ‘Don’t tell me!'”
Aguirre’s grandmother described him as a loving son who hugged his mother and told her he loved her every day.
“He was a good kid,” Hernandez said. “He was so handsome.”
But not everyone has such comments about those who died.
Tiffany St. Peters says she doesn’t remember much about her father, James St. Peters, because he left the family when she was 12 years old.
Th 23-year-old woman didn’t know her father was one of the five workers who died in the accident until a reporter came to her door in Riverside, Calif. on Thursday.
Her father’s family had been trying to find him through the Salvation Army recently because his mother had died and they wanted to notify him.
Tiffany St. Peters said she thought her father was living on the streets and was at least comforted to hear he was working and supporting himself.
Her mother, Gayle St. Peters of Riverside, had also lost track of her ex-husband.
She said he was a Navy veteran and a licensed welder. They were married 21 years.
She recalled that he looked like George Carlin and had a similar personality.
“He was a polite man, but he had a temper,” she said Thursday.
The last memory Tiffany St. Peters has of her father is as a tall, lanky man with a bald spot.
“I thought he was homless,” she said. “Fire is not a nice way to go, but it’s better than him living on the streets or doing drugs.”
St. Peters said she doesn’t have any ill will toward her dad, because she found out he had been abused as a child and struggled with his temper.
“I forgive him now,” she said.
Staff writer Steve Lipsher contributed to this report.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
