GEORGETOWN — Rescuers did not lower an air supply to five workers trapped inside a smoky hydroelectric conduit until 2-1/2 hours after a fire broke out, officials said Wednesday.
The five contractors perished inside the 12-foot-wide concrete-and-steel tunnel Tuesday after sparking a fire in some fresh epoxy they were applying, even though they sent a radio message that they were still all OK an hour later.
As recovery crews retrieved the bodies, dozens of state and federal officials converged at the scene to investigate what went wrong.
Gov. Bill Ritter committed several state agencies to the task as the contractor that hired the workers, RPI Coating of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., searched for explanations.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is now the lead investigative agency looking into the cause of the accident.
The Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office initially led the investigation, and although they will continue to assist the investigation, OSHA will coordinate the activities of numerous state, local and federal officials.
“It’s an OSHA regulated facility,” said Kathleen Gaubatz, spokeswoman for the Clear Creek County Office of Emergency Response.
Meantime, the bodies of the five men were taken to the Jefferson County Medical Examiner’s office where autopsies will be performed, Gaubatz said.
Herb Gibson, area OSHA director, said the autopsies will help them determine whether the victims died of asphyxiation, smoke inhalation or other causes, which finding will be critical to their investigation.
Late Wednesday, Cleark Creek County Undersheriff Stu Nay said 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, he said.
Jeff Szalkowski, owner of Glacier Painting and a certified handler of hazardous materials for 17 years in Colorado and Alaska, said the flash point of industrial coatings is critical.
“All paints have a flashpoint, where they will ignite. The more solvents in a paint, the more flammable the paint becomes,” said Szalkowski. “A solid epoxy with few solvents is much less flammable.
“The electrical equipment like airless sprayers need to be grounded so that any spark stays within the unit,” he said.
“We’re all devastated by this today,” said Marc Dyer, director of sales and marketing at RPI, also known as Robison-Prezioso Inc. “Usually all of the equipment we use is explosion-proof that shouldn’t cause sparks. The epoxy coating being applied does not present a lot of danger under normal circumstances.”
The delay in lowering scuba-style tanks and masks Tuesday was because rescue crews had to figure out where the trapped workers had taken refuge in the 4,000-foot tunnel. Rescue workers also were stymied by smoke in the tunnel, which reduced visibility.
The bodies of the five men were found within 200 feet of each other. They apparently never had a chance to use the air tanks or masks, according to Clear Creek County Undersheriff Stu Nay.
Rescuers used high-volume fans from the top of the tunnel to clear the smoke.
Visibility about 3 feet
It took a while for would-be rescuers from a dozen different agencies — coming from as far away as the metro area — to arrive and launch the search.
Heavy smoke was pouring out of the bottom of the 12-foot-wide tunnel, said Jim Arnold, general manager of the Henderson Mine outside Empire, 15 highway miles from Georgetown.
Initial reports Tuesday said the tunnel was 4 feet wide.
“There’s preparation you have to do,” Arnold said. “We had to get people to the mine. We had to get our equipment set up and get suited up. We had to set out a plan: What do you do? Do you go in from the top or in from the bottom? If you were there, you would have thought it happened awfully quickly.”
The team prepares in similar environments and is composed of medically trained personnel and specialists in engineering, ventilation and even chemistry in case they encounter “oddball chemicals” like the burning epoxy in the pipe.
With a backup team in place in case the initial team got into trouble — and another team from a Nevada gold mine that happened to be training in the area — five-member units from the Henderson mine-rescue team entered the bottom of the pipe about 5:45 p.m. Tuesday.
They wore full face masks providing air and initially encountered visibility of about 3 feet, Arnold said.
They were optimistic the contractors would be found alive, he said.
At 7:51 p.m., the crew reached the trapped men, discovered they were dead, and retreated, leaving the bodies to be recovered Wednesday.
The men, whose bodies were found scattered along a 200 foot length of the pipe, didn’t have any burn marks, indicating that they probably died from the smoke and fumes from the chemical fire, officials said Wednesday night.
Exacting safety needed
Even Wednesday’s recovery effort proved deliberate. West Metro firefighters checked the air quality every 100 feet as they led a second team, made up of Clear Creek County personnel and CBI investigators.
The recovery teams reached the victims about 3:20 p.m. Wednesday and the bodies were removed one by one, with the task completed in the evening. The bodies were taken to the Jefferson County coroner’s office in Golden.
The workers were identified as Donald Dejaynes, 43; Dupree Holt, 37; James St. Peters, 52; Gary Foster, 48; Anthony Aguirre, 18; all of California. Their hometowns weren’t immediately available.
The work at the Xcel plant was scheduled more than a year ago after a routine inspection revealed pitting in the concrete, he said. The company began work there Sept. 4, and they were scheduled to finish by the first part of November.
The fire broke out at 2 p.m. about 1,400 feet from the lower end of a tunnel that brings water from the Upper Cabin Creek Reservoir to the Lower Cabin Creek Reservoir and to the hydroelectric plant.
There were 11 men in the crew. Four were below the fire and two were outside. Five of the six survivors were injured, one of them after he raced into the tunnel to help.
One injured victim was still being treated Wednesday night in the burn unit at a Denver hospital. The others were treated and released.
The workers who survived saw the other five climb the 4,000-foot tunnel. The victims last communicated by radio about a hour after the fire broke out and reported no injuries. But the tunnel was slick and steep.
“The only option they had to get out was to go back through the fire,” Nay said.
The victims were wearing Tyvek suits and masks commonly used by painters — but did not have scuba-type air supplies.
“We’ve done a lot of projects like this one and never had trouble before,” Dyer said. “These men were very experienced people. This is a challenging project because of the degree of angles of the pipe (slopes).
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“You’ve got to keep all of your atmospheric conditions under control,” said Szalkowski, the local painter who says Colorado has a lax approach to inspecting hazardous conditions involving industrial coatings. “You have to keep an air supply moving through the pipe, with both negative and positive air-pressure fans. They also should have had gas-monitoring detectors with them.
“Colorado needs more regulation. Very few people know how to do this work.”
Mark Salley, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said he was not aware of any licensing or permitting requirements for confined-space painters. Chris Liens, spokesman for Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies, said the state does not regulate the application of industrial coatings.
An Xcel spokesman said the safety of the men was the contractor’s responsibility.
“They are experts in the field, and that’s why we hired them,” said spokesman Tom Henley.
Families of victims, who began arriving in Georgetown on Wednesday afternoon, were being offered grief counseling.
“We have to take care of the families,” Nay said. “The care of them is a priority to us.”
A relief fund has been established at the Clear Creek National Bank for the victims’ families. Contributions may be sent to the Idaho Springs Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 1774, Idaho Springs, CO 80452.
The Georgetown Mountain Inn offered the families free lodging through the week.
Sally Kennerson, chief executive of the Idaho Springs Chamber of Commerce, which includes Georgetown, said the community is mourning the tragedy even though none of the victims were local.
“I don’t think anybody realized the extent of operations up there,” she said. “Being a mining community, we’re always prepared for mining disasters. I don’t think we even thought of that as a place where we would lose people.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
