PIPELINE WATCHDOG

Almost two decades after the Olympic Pipeline explosion in Bellingham, Carl Weimer continues the fight to improve national pipeline safety standards.

Story by Tyler Kendig | Photos by Regan Bervar

An occasional blackened tree is the only reminder that the worst pipeline disaster in Washington history once devastated Whatcom Creek. After nearly two decades of restoration, scorched vegetation has given way to new life.

Eighteen years after the Olympic Pipeline explosion, Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, walked along a nature trail once drowned in gasoline, pointing to clues of the tragedy. While physical traces of the explosion continue to fade, environmental restoration was just the beginning. The real cleanup would extend beyond Bellingham, taking Weimer before Congress to speak on behalf of a devastated and angry community, setting the stage for debates over pipeline safety regulations that continue today.

On June 10, 1999, a fireball ripped through the heart of Whatcom Falls Park. A dent in the 643-kilometer Olympic Pipeline had ruptured underground and almost 900,000 liters of gasoline bubbled to the surface and surged downhill to Whatcom Creek.

A curtain of toxic vapors drifted through the park and enveloped Liam Wood, an 18-year-old fly fisherman who was exploring the creek for salmon. Moments later, he collapsed into the water and drowned. Farther up the creek, 10-year-olds Wade King and Stephen Tsiorvas had found a source of entertainment familiar to many their age: a fireplace lighter. The explosion engulfed about a kilometer of Whatcom Creek and sent a tower of black smoke taller than Mount Everest into the air. Both boys passed away the next day.

An army of people were brought in to assess damages and work on restoration, said Mark Henderson, a water quality specialist for Bellingham’s Department of Ecology. On the first day, his team wore respirator suits and trudged through thick, yellow water, bagging thousands of dead fish that had floated to the top of the creek.

“It’d be really nice if you could trust everybody to do the right thing, but, in fact, they don’t,” Henderson said. “You’ve got to hold people’s feet to the fire.”

A few days after the explosion, Weimer and a small group of environmentalists, doctors and lawyers met to do just that. Over breakfast at the Old Town Café in Bellingham they hatched a plan to start a pipeline watchdog coalition called SAFE Bellingham. As residents struggled to make sense of the tragedy, Olympic Pipe Line Company was scrambling to install a new pipe and resume service to Seattle Tacoma Airport.

“They were going to do it real quick, before they even had a clue why the pipeline had failed, and that didn’t make much sense to people,” Weimer said.

The courts agreed. Within a month, a federal criminal investigation was filed against Olympic Pipe Line Company. Olympic and its owners doled out more than $180 million in fines and settlements, and federal regulators kept the pipeline closed longer than any other pipeline in U.S. history at the time.

In 1999, rules related to pipeline safety were thin. Prior to the explosion in Whatcom Creek, once a pipeline was constructed no laws required it to be inspected further, Weimer said. Incident data was scarce and pipeline maps were not accessible. But a few months after Weimer and the families first testified in front of Congress, the Pipeline Safety Act of 2000 passed in Washington, which required periodic inspections of pipelines.

After a slew of fatal accidents in 2000, including an explosion in New Mexico that killed a dozen campers, Congress approved a 2002 bill that further tightened regulations. Similar bills followed in 2006, 2011 and 2016.

“It seems like every time there’s a tragedy they step it up a little bit more, and then when people forget after a few years it starts backsliding again,” Weimer said.

Weimer walked along the trail toward the wastewater treatment plant where the Olympic Pipeline first ruptured. He pointed in the direction of Kulshan Middle School. A year after the explosion, Olympic was required to test the pipeline by filling it with water and increasing the pressure past normal capacity. A large section of the pipe burst near the school.

He paused as an excited flock of eighth graders ran past and giggled amongst themselves. Julie Bennett, their science teacher, trailed behind and greeted Weimer.

“Hi,” she said to him, before adding, “You’re my hero.”

She told Weimer that over the years she had used the Olympic Pipeline explosion in teaching a unit on properties of matter and chemical reactions to her students.

“You just walk out of my room and the pipeline’s right there,” Bennett said. “So, if you’re a middle schooler and you ask ‘why do we have to study all this stuff?’ I can say, ‘well, let’s go see what happened a few years ago.’”

Weimer’s ability to help crack open a national debate on pipeline safety was fueled by a lifetime of tackling environmental issues. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1976 with a degree in Natural Resources and Environmental Education, he spent the next decade working in various natural resource agencies around the country. In 1983, he and his wife moved to Whatcom County. Two decades later, after 13 years as the executive director of RE Sources for Sustainable Communities, a local environmental organization, Weimer was asked to lead the Pipeline Safety Trust.

“I actually tried to get out of it,” Weimer said with a laugh.

But after two nationwide searches proved fruitless, he agreed to lead the coalition. In 2003, when U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein endowed the Pipeline Safety Trust with $4 million, she said she knew it paled in comparison to the lobbying power of the oil industry.

She was quoted in news reports saying, “It’s not even David and Goliath. It’s more like Bambi and Godzilla.”

In 2005, Weimer ran for a position on the Whatcom County Council, a seat he still holds.

Seth Fleetwood, a fellow progressive and former member of the Whatcom County Council who served with Weimer in the mid-2000s, said Weimer was good-natured and had strong ethics on environmental preservation.

“I’ve always enjoyed working with Carl,” Fleetwood said. “He’s been a brave leader in our community for many, many years.”

The Pipeline Safety Trust’s work is far from done. Over the last 20 years, 11,400 pipeline accidents spilled more than over 300 million liters of oil and gas around the country, according to the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. That’s enough liquid to flood Western Washington University’s campus nearly one meter high with oil. Among those accidents, 832 were classified as “serious” and resulted in 310 deaths, 1,300 injuries and approximately $7 billion in damages.

To this day, dozens of federal pipeline safety regulations still in effect were written by oil and natural gas industry groups, said Rebecca Craven, program director for the Pipeline Safety Trust. Many of these regulations are copyrighted, meaning the public has to pay to access them.

“It’s not the fox guarding the henhouse,” Craven said, quoting Weimer. “It’s the fox designing the henhouse.”

On a table outside of her office, a toy Godzilla wearing a hard hat stands beside a small Bambi figurine.

“[Pipeline safety is] a fairly fascinating subject because you’re dealing with the oil and gas industry, who’s probably one of the most powerful industries on earth, but finding out that there’s ways you can outmaneuver them, and sometimes work with them,” Weimer said.