In a break from the driving rain, firefighters began their descent through a two-foot hole and into a water pipe Thursday night in search of missing dead.
The missing were construction workers, gone since a 60-foot pillar of fire erupted from a punctured petroleum pipeline beside Las Lomas High School on Tuesday afternoon. Three of their colleagues already lie in the morgue, victims of one of Contra Costa County's worst industrial accidents.
On Thursday night, the firefighters' single-minded pursuit was the recovery mission.
"We're going to go until we get these bodies out tonight," said Battalion Chief Steve Maiero of the Contra Costa Fire District.
The massive recovery effort has shut down South Broadway between Newell Avenue and Rudgear Road since 1:24 p.m. Tuesday, when the explosion and raging fire burned two buildings and forced evacuation of two schools and an adjacent neighborhood. The section of South Broadway between Newell Avenue and Rudgear Road was expected to be closed until Saturday.
Life returned to normal for most residents living near the 12-foot-deep trench where a backhoe digging too close apparently clipped the high-pressure fuel line. Contractors were working to install a massive water pipe for the East Bay Municipal Utility District just a few feet from the fuel line's path.
The project site remained a moonscape of scorched machinery and explosive vapors until Thursday afternoon, when round-the-clock efforts to cap and siphon the broken line finally allowed investigators to approach.
Two men were found dead after the initial explosion. Five more went to area hospitals with severe burns, including Javier Ramos, who died Wednesday night in the burn unit at Doctors Medical Center in San Pablo.
"I wanted to break down," said Oakley resident Alfredo Ramirez, who visited his bandage-swathed cousin, Miguel Fuentes, at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento on Thursday. Fuentes remained in critical condition.
The county coroner's deputies do not expect to know the names of the men being recovered from the water pipe or the other two until today, when a forensic dentist will compare their remains to dental records.
A union representative identified one of the missing men as Dae Im, a member of Laborers Local 324.
Im survived the initial blast but was fatally burned while trying to save a coworker,, said Randy LeMoine, business manager of the Martinez-based union.
When the petroleum line burst, it blasted gasoline into the open end of the 69-inch diameter water pipe, where a welding crew was working. The men were reported missing by Livermore-based contractor Mountain Cascade and Oakley-based Matamoros Welding.
After two days of digging and drilling and two more flare-ups of the gas-flooded rupture, crews finally stopped the flow of residual gasoline on both ends of the fuel line Wednesday night. They spent Thursday battling the weather, as rain destabilized the unreinforced sides of the dirt trench and made it dangerous to enter.
Finally, on Thursday evening, workers dangled in a basket above the mud to plug the 1-inch diameter hole in the fuel line and circle it with a metal sheath, Maiero said. A vacuum device inserted in the pipe sucked away the remaining flammable fumes.
Only then could a team of specially trained firefighters enter a service portal atop the water pipe north of the blast scene.
On Wednesday night, workers dropped a camera-equipped robot into a similar portal farther north. That robot captured images of one of the dead welders, Maiero said.
Maiero took a handful of reporters to the site Thursday afternoon. During a heavy downpour, crews worked in the "hot zone," an area close to the explosion site that officials previously considered too volatile to enter. They determined it was safe after pumping 2,500 gallons of gasoline from the pipe.
Charred remains of a dirt-hauling dump truck could be seen near the explosion site, close to a backhoe. North of that spot, the water pipe lay at the bottom of a trench, and the 10-inch diameter petroleum pipe could be seen closer to the top, running through the side of the trench and only partially exposed.
The fuel line could be seen in places poking out from the walls of the trench, showing how close the claw of the backhoe came to it as work progressed on the site. "(The rupture) could have happened three or four days earlier," Maiero said of the exposed sections of fuel line.
Whether the workers understood where the fuel line ran, whether they followed state guidelines and whether they properly notified fuel pipe owner Kinder Morgan Energy Partners of their digging remain in question. Thursday was the first day state, local and federal investigators could come within 100 yards of the explosion site.
"We are still at an early stage in the investigation," Contra Costa Fire Marshal Richard Carpenter said. "We do not have that information yet."
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