After the deadly chemical tank rupture that killed 11 people last Tuesday at a paper mill in Longview, questions continue to loom over the community — including what environmental impacts the chemical spill could have on the city and nearby Columbia River, as well as the potential cause of this disaster.
It’s Washington’s deadliest workplace incident in nearly a century.
Officials from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board arrived in Longview last Wednesday to investigate the cause of the chemical disaster. The future of the board has been uncertain in recent months after a proposed budget from President Trump would have defunded the federal agency. But yesterday afternoon, the House Appropriations Committee adopted an amendment brought by U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez to add over $5 million to preserve the full funding for the CSB.
We’ll hear more from Gluesenkamp Perez, whose congressional district includes Longview, for more on the investigation and the impact of the disaster on the Longview community.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with an update on Washington’s deadliest workplace incident in nearly a century, the chemical tank rupture that killed 11 people at a paper mill in Longview last week. It happened at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Company, which is in Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s congressional district. Over the last week, she’s been sounding the alarm about a few different issues. She called on the company to pay its workers while the incident is being investigated, and she’s been pushing for the investigation to happen and to not be hampered by a loss of federal funding. There was movement on both of those fronts yesterday, and Representative Gluesenkamp Perez joins us now to talk about it. Welcome back to the show.
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: Hi Dave.
Miller: I want to start before we get to those issues I just mentioned, just with the human side of this. Can you give us a sense for how a tragedy of this scale has been impacting the community?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Well, this is a really tight knit community. Everybody knows everybody, like I was calling to text and check in on friends on my way up and a lot of these victims and a lot of the people who work there are sole providers for their families, and everybody’s got bills to pay. Things are increasingly tight, and just the stress and trauma of seeing like mill after mill close in our region, it’s just got people really at high anxiety levels.
Miller: Have you talked to survivors?
Gluesenkamp Perez: I’ve talked to a few employees and their families. The families of victims have been reaching out on a bunch of different issues, but including whatever we can do on casework, Social Security benefits for the children of survivors, that kind of thing.
Miller: I want to turn to the federal investigation. It’s being done by a federal agency that probably many people, including me, had never heard of before last week, the Chemical Safety Board, which is akin to the National Transportation Safety Board that investigates plane crashes and I think it’s much more well known because of that. The Trump administration told OPB on Monday that it views the CSB as, quote, “An unconstitutional independent agency that directly violates the prerogative of the president to oversee the executive branch as he sees fit. Furthermore, CSB is redundant and duplicates authorities properly vested in EPA and OSHA.” What’s your response about whether or not this agency should even exist?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Well, I think the families and workers all believe that this is a necessary independent watchdog, and that bringing clarity and answers is a real pressing concern here. This is a necessary part of having a domestic industrial economy in this country, that people have safe jobs where they come home to their families. And I’m very grateful that my colleagues in the House disagree with that sentiment and have funded the CSB and worked with me to make sure that they have the resources necessary to ensure a thorough investigation that’s impartial.
Miller: Right, what happened in your appropriations subcommittee yesterday? Where does funding stand right now?
Gluesenkamp Perez: So the Trump administration had zeroed it out in their proposed budget. Fortunately, yesterday we were able to increase it to their FY 26 levels of 14 million. So the proposed budget in the House during markup had been, I think, 8.2. So we’re able to get that back up to ensure they’re able to operate and get these answers out quickly to families who are grieving and demanding answers.
Miller: The numbers here are shockingly small. It’s almost hard to fathom that we’re talking about $8 million, a fight over that in the federal budget as opposed to billions or trillions.
Gluesenkamp Perez: Yeah, when you watch the way that money moves through appropriations, it is shocking that they’re looking for pennies under the couch at the expense of families who are grieving. And I was fortunate. Chairman Simpson, he is from Idaho. They have a strong relationship with the timber industry and understand how tragedies like this impact families and how vital it is that we continue to have a domestic timber industry, especially with the incursion of plastic imports replacing our natural resource economy.
Miller: These investigations, depending on the complexity of what’s involved, I’ve read they can take anywhere from about six months to two years or more. In the meantime, while we wait for that, have you heard anything substantive about what actually happened, about what led this tragedy to happen?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Well, the investigation is obviously still ongoing. I mean, we know that it was a spill of white liquor. We don’t understand entirely why the tank failed and what was ongoing in the facility, and so it’s important that we are patient and waiting for those facts to come. I think broadly we can look and say that we have lost mill after mill in the region and that has created a lot of pressure on these industries to scale down and try to find any savings they can.
We’ve also seen a loss in skilled trades investment in our region, losing shop class in high school and junior high, underfunded technical programs, and that’s something I’ve been working with and thinking about. This mill needs to get back up and running and it’s going to be looking at doing that with a reduced workforce because of the casualties. And so how are we going to ensure that these jobs are lucrative, that they are safe, that they are supported throughout their growth from young kids all the way up to master technicians.
Miller: Has the company given you any indication about their long term plans for this facility which employs more than 1,000 people in your district?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Yeah, it’s one of only two mills that actually takes wood chips, and so I’ve been talking to other mill owners and operators in the region. This is potentially a real risk to any of the wildfire thinning that goes on, that small diameter material that comes out of the woods during a wildfire mitigation project really relies on being able to have some value in being able to sell those chips somewhere to cover the cost of diesel for those removal projects. So there’s a lot of interdependence between the different timber, paper, cardboard industries in the region.
We do know that the steam plant is operational, which is critical because a neighboring mill relies on that energy to power their operations. So while it’s 550 jobs at this mill directly, there’s another 500 jobs next door that rely on that steam plant, and innumerable businesses in the region, whether we’re talking about log truck operators or smaller businesses or the IBEW. I mean, this mill is a really complex and necessary piece of the broader infrastructure here. And we don’t want to see a pyrrhic victory where we’re achieving a net carbon zero emissions through a closure of our domestic cardboard and paper. We’re exporting these jobs somewhere else or switching to fossil fuel-based plastics.
Miller: Earlier this week, you wrote a letter seeking clarification from the company, from Nippon Dynawave, about how long they would be paying employees who cannot work because of this disaster. There was, as I mentioned briefly, movement on that as well yesterday. So where does that stand right now?
Gluesenkamp Perez: So, the company put out a press release following my letter, affirming that employees who are not able to work due to mill outage will be paid at least through August 8, which is shorter than I’d initially been told, initially I heard during the course of the investigation. Obviously the investigation needs to be thorough and complete and that’s a long horizon, but we want to see these jobs withheld and we want to ensure that as families are grieving and negotiating… I mean, the interconnected here, like families are all babysitting for each other, somebody having to switch to night shift or not getting a paycheck at all is a real burden and anxiety for families. So I was encouraged by the August 8 timeline, and we’ll continue to press to make sure that employees are whole in this and working with the unions to do that.
Miller: I should know we’re gonna be talking with a union spokesperson about this on Monday of next week. Finally, Representative Gluesenkamp Perez, what’s the latest that you’ve heard about the environmental impact of this spill?
Gluesenkamp Perez: Well, fortunately, white liquor, I mean, it’s got a pH of 13, so it’s very, very basic, but we’re not talking about something like forever chemicals or something like that. So while it’s dangerous, it’s not particularly volatile in the sense of evaporating into the atmosphere. So the readings that we’ve heard from the Department of Ecology are that there was no impact to air quality in the region, and that the leakage, as far as we know, has been limited to the dikes surrounding and not a serious outflow to the Columbia River.
Miller: Representative Gluesenkamp Perez, thanks very much.
Gluesenkamp Perez: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is the Democratic representative from Washington’s 3rd congressional district. That includes Longview, the site of the paper mill disaster that killed 11 people last week.
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