Headline: Blasts ripped Louisville streets, spurred hazardous material law

Abstract

The disaster prompted the city of Louisville and Jefferson County four years later to adopt the community's first hazardous materials ordinance, putting the Metropolitan Sewer District in charge of regulating the storage and disposal of such dangerous materials. The explosion, said MSD executive director Bud Schardein, is one of the reasons the agency still closely monitors for explosive gas es and limits their concentrations in sewer lines.

Byline: JAMES BRUGGERS

[email protected]

Source: The Courier-Journal

It was a Friday the 13th to remember ... the day the sewers exploded in Louisville.

The year was 1981.

At 5:16 a.m., Elsie Fisher and Shirley Rhodes were on their regular early morning rides from their West End homes to their jobs at a local hospital. They had stopped for a red light at 12th and Hill streets. The light changed, the car accelerated, and seconds later, according to an account in The Courier-Journal, the street blew apart.

The blast hurled their car into the air and onto its side.

At the same time, 1,000 feet in the air, a police helicopter searching for a stolen Ford Thunderbird was heading toward the downtown area. The officers saw an unforgettable sight: a series of explosions, like a bombing run, they told the newspaper, erupting along the streets of Old Louisville, near the University of Louisville campus.

The blasts, possibly triggered by a spark from the women's car, wrecked more than two miles of Louisville streets. A front page photo the next day in The Courier-Journal showed a Louisville Water Co. worker dwarfed by a gaping crater in the pavement at Seventh Street and Jordan Avenue.

No one was seriously hurt, but there was extensive damage to homes and businesses.

The cause? An illegal discharge of thousands of gallons of the solvent hexane from the former Ralston-Purina soybean plant on Floyd Street.

The disaster prompted the city of Louisville and Jefferson County four years later to adopt the community's first hazardous materials ordinance, putting the Metropolitan Sewer District in charge of regulating the storage and disposal of such dangerous materials.

The explosion, said MSD executive director Bud Schardein, is one of the reasons the agency still closely monitors for explosive gas es and limits their concentrations in sewer lines.

"Sometimes it takes an event like that to shake people enough to raise awareness, to say we need to do something like this," he said of the 1985 enactment of the city-county hazardous materials ordinance.

It took nearly two years for the city to repair the sewer lines, and several more months to finish street repairs, according to MSD.

Ralston-Purina eventually pleaded guilty to four counts of violating federal environmental laws. It paid a fine of $62,500. On top of that, the company in 1984 agreed to pay MSD more than $18 million in damages and "millions more" to other government agencies and private individuals who suffered damage, according to MSD.

The company used city industrial bonds to rebuild its plant in 1983, and then sold it in 1984. The facility, with its landmark storage silos along Interstate 65 near the University of Louisville Belknap Campus, is now operated by Protein Technologies International, a company that Schardein describes as a "customer" with a good track record with MSD.

Schardein was not employed by MSD at the time. But he was working as a plumber and welder about a block from where the explosions occurred.

"I heard a series of explosions," he said. "It was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom."

He climbed up onto the roof of the building where he was working and could see the collapsed pavement of 12th Street .

Reporters and editors working that day for the newspaper detailed a dramatic story of one of the largest sewer explosions in the United States.

"It was one of the most dramatic environmental catastrophes I ever covered," said Jim Detjen, who spent 21 years in daily journalism and worked at the newspaper in the 1970s and early 1980s.

"It was an incredible mess," said Detjen, who now teaches environmental journalism at Michigan State University, noting that the nonfunctional sewer system began to smell and damaged roads tied up traffic.

The newspaper on Feb. 14 and Feb. 15 reported on the chemical, the company where it came from, the response from emergency workers and the reaction of residents.

A U of L student, Gary Sullivan, who lived on South Second Street, said his "whole bathroom blew apart. I saw it self destruct."

The explosion knocked Jeff Nuckols, an Old Louisville coffee shop waiter, to the floor. "I didn't know if the building was coming down on me or not," he said at the time.

As fumes built up downstream in the sewer line in west Louisville, police evacuated several schools and an oil refinery.

At 3:45 p.m., what the newspaper called "The Friday the 13th monster" had "gasped it s last breath."

That's when the last manhole cover popped up at Second Street and Burnett Avenue.

Company officials offered no comment.

Sunday's coverage included a story by Detjen that detailed the area's many environmental troubles, including the illegal dumping of hazardous waste at "The Valley of the Drums" in Bullitt County, a chemical barge accident and the headline: "Region needs to take more stabs to slay toxic dragon."

Despite the explosion, R.C. Watts of the Louisville and Jefferson County Civil Preparedness Office told Detjen that: "Things are much, much better than they were two years ago."

1981 SEWER EXPLOSIONS

Caption: A sewer explosion in 1981, blamed on an illegal release of the solvent hexane, destroyed two miles of Louisville streets. It took nearly two years to repair the sewer lines, and several more months to finish street repairs.

COURIER-JOURNAL