Lawmakers are demanding answers after a "violent" chemical explosion and fire at a pharmaceutical facility in Newburyport, Massachusetts, left a worker dead, sent four others to the hospital, and blasted debris during the early morning hours on Thursday.
A letter to Managing Director of Seqens North America Baoguo Huang from Senator Ed Markey, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Seth Moulton grilled facility leaders on "repeated violations and disasters" and "serious" OSHA violations over the years.
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U.S. lawmakers also asked for a timeline and cause of the explosion that happened early Thursday morning, including the systems and chemicals involved in the blast.
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"This explosion is only the latest avoidable disaster at this facility, following years of serious safety violations, multiple fines, and other explosions," the lawmakers said in the letter. "We write seeking the explanation as to why this latest incident occurred and how, after years of fines and regulatory enforcement actions, Seqens could have allowed unsafe conditions to persist."
Worker killed credited with saving others' lives
The Essex County District Attorney's Office identified the man killed early Friday morning as 62-year-old Jack O'Keefe of Methuen. Friends and family say he was a single father of two kids, a son and a loving friend to many.
Billy Carter told NBC10 Boston that his brother who was injured in the Newburyport chemical explosion was saved by O’Keefe…
“I think my buddy Jack saved those guys lives because they wanted to help him do what he was going to do and he told them not to," Carter said.
Carter said his brother told him what happened in the moments before the explosion.
“He told me that Jack went into a room it was really hot in there and told the guys to stay back. Jack was there for 30 years he knows all the equipment in that building and I don’t know what happened but it just exploded.”
The latest on the investigation
Later Friday morning, Deputy Fire Chief of the Newburyport Fire Department Barry Salt held a news conference to give an update on the efforts by crews at the site of the explosion.
Salt said that crews would be working Friday to mitigate hazardous materials that remain and secure the building to make it safe to access.
"There's still uncontained drums of solvents that was part of the process of manufacturing," Deputy Chief Salt said. "So they'll control that and then secure all of that."
Fire officials said the work would eventually make it safe for a cleaning company to enter the site, which would then turn it back over to the facility's owners once clean-up is done.
“The concern of the workers today, there’s still an inhalation hazard and there’s still a fire hazard because it's all highly flammable material that they’re working with," Salt said. "And it's material that’s not stored currently because of an explosion, its not in a safe atmosphere."
"The concern is to keep the ignition sources down, to keep the respiratory systems clean and to be able to work to safely finish the day out without incident," he continued.
Salt assured the public that there was not a risk to the community or environment when asked by reporters, saying that air quality was being monitored in the area. He did say, though, that air quality was an initial concern in the moments following the blast, but that concern faded quickly.
"The facility has self-containment for spills, everything is contained on-site," Salt said. "Previously, the only danger to the public was the event itself, which fortunately was in the middle of the night when no one was around, and the air quality was a concern initially, but it faded fast. The wind was blowing strong."
The explosion came amid a "chemical process that they do continually everyday," but an actual cause hasn't been determined yet. The worker killed was in the production area of the facility, while the other four employees who were in the building were toward an office area.
The explosion and fire happened around 12:45 a.m. Thursday at the plant on Opportunity Way, and emergency crews arrived to find heavy fire. At the time of the explosion, there were five workers in the building, one of whom remained unaccounted for essentially the entire day.
Heavy structural damage proved to be a challenge posed to the search, with a Coast Guard helicopter being called in at one point to search for the worker from above — to no avail.
At a news conference Thursday evening, Newburyport Fire Chief Steve Bradbury announced that the man's body had been found. Fire officials said around 9:15 p.m. that the worker's body had been extricated.
The cause of Thursday morning's explosion remains under investigation by officials.
