All Workers Accounted For At Connecticut Explosion Site

All workers at a natural gas power plant here that was rocked by an explosion Sunday have been accounted for, the Middletown Office of the Mayor said Monday.

The written statement from Mayor Sebastian N. Giuliano's office didn't provide an updated casualty count. Earlier Monday, Deputy Fire Marshal Al Santostefano said that the death count hadn't risen since Sunday, when the number of casualties was reported at five dead.

The cause of the incident, which hit a Kleen Energy Systems LLC plant under construction in a sparse industrial area here at 11:25 a.m. EST Sunday, remains uncertain. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, a federal agency charged with investigating serious chemical accidents, said Monday it was sending a seven-person team to investigate the blast.

A state official said Sunday that the gas explosion was caused by a "flame device" that a victim's son had been told was a propane heater. Federal safety officials said Sunday they were trying to determine if the Middletown explosion was related to previous accidents around the country in which plant operators attempted to remove existing gas from the pipelines, a process called purging.

On Feb. 4, the Chemical Safety Board issued what it called "urgent" safety recommendations on natural fuel gas codes on purging. The recommendations stemmed from an investigation into an explosion at a ConAgra Foods Inc. (CAG) Slim Jim plant in Garner, N.C., which killed four people and injured 67 in June 2009.

Santostefano said Sunday that workers were indeed "blowing down gas in the pipes," by which he meant that they were purging.

Officials suspended their search and rescue efforts at the plant around 2:30 a.m. EST Monday morning, as a portion of the structure was deemed too unstable to continue the work, said Santostefano.

Giuliano said in the statement that recovery efforts hadn't resumed at the plant due to unsafe conditions. Falling debris is a concern for investigators, with wind gusts on the site in excess of 25 miles per hour, according to the statement. Fire officials are working with police at the facility.

Union officials speaking near the site of the explosion said they didn't know of any previous safety concerns at the nearly $1 billion plant, adding the people working Sunday were professionals with safety training. They had no information on the cause of the incident and declined to release information on the deceased.

Sometimes tearing up, union officials asked for prayers for those injured and killed, as well as their families.

Charles Appleby Jr., business manager for the local chapter of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters union, said seven members of the union injured in the explosion have been discharged from the hospital. Only one remains in the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

"It is tragic; families are hurting," said Michael Rosario, business representative for the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union, Local 777, who rushed over to the site after hearing the explosion, crediting some of the workers with saving people in the chaos following the explosion.

Santostefano said it's unclear how devastating the damage will be to the future of the plant, which is majority owned by Energy Investors Funds, a private equity group. He said there wasn't any damage to the natural gas infrastructure outside the plant. All damage was contained to the plant site.

Energy Investors Funds said Sunday in an emailed statement that it "wishes to express our enormous sympathy and concern for the workers at the Kleen Energy plant and their families."

The 620-megawatt plant was due to come online in the fall; construction began in June 2008. The project, situated along the Connecticut River, was supposed to supply energy to 500,000 residents in a state that has among the highest electricity prices in the nation.

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, (D., Conn.), said she and fellow Connecticut U.S. Reps. John Larson and Joe Courtney, both also Democrats, had requested that U.S. Rep. George Miller, (D., Calif.), hold a hearing to look into the explosion. Miller is chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor. DeLauro said Miller had agreed to hold a hearing, though no date has yet been set.

"There are similarities with the ConAgra situation," DeLauro said, referring to the North Carolina plant explosion.

The Department of Transportation's Pipeline Safety and Hazardous Materials Administration isn't involved in the investigation of the explosion because it's not in its jurisdiction, a Chemical Safety Board spokesman said, indicating the cause of the explosion was likely on-site rather than related to gas pipelines. The plant is served by the Algonquin pipeline, which is owned by Spectra Energy Corp. (SE).

Chemical Safety Board spokesman Daniel Horowitz said the agency hasn't determined the cause of the blast, but are investigating gas purging as "a very significant concern."

-By Mark Peters, Dow Jones Newswires; mark.peters@dowjones.com; (212) 416-2457

(Ian Talley in Washington and Tim Aeppel of The Wall Street Journal contributed to this article.)

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