Blenheim Blast Recalled 25 Years Later

That morning, a Schoharie County deputy sheriff thought the level of fog over the hamlet of North Blenheim was unusual. He mentioned it in a radio call.

Meanwhile, in a house above Westkill Road, Blenheim town supervisor Robert Shaffer was getting ready to feed his beef cattle. He peered out at the unusual white vapor and decided there might be a problem with the nearby underground liquid propane gas line owned by Texas Eastern Products Pipeline Co.

His brother-in-law, John Gallagher, would later tell an interviewer the vapor looked like snow.

Shaffer was aware that pipeline company employees had used a backhoe to do excavating work in the vicinity of the propane transmission system a few weeks earlier. He decided to call Texas Eastern and report what he suspected was a gas emergency.

Shaffer, now deceased, was advised by a pipeline representative it was a prudent move to call because the company was aware there was a pressure problem in the line but had not yet pinpointed it, said his daughter, Gail Shaffer, who, at the time, happened to be New York's secretary of state.

It was approximately 7:39 a.m. on March 13, 1990 — a date now recalled by Blenheim residents as a day of infamy — that the death-dealing fireball erupted when a gas leak sparked a huge explosion.

The fireball turned into a billowing wall of flames that rolled along embankments near Westkill Creek, leaving pastures scorched and incinerating towering pine trees before rolling uphill to its source, the leaky line of propane. It was reported that this "bright orange plume of fire" continued to burn for hours. More than 15 area fire companies responded.

RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES

Two people were killed in that inferno that raged 25 years ago this month. A total of 14 buildings were leveled and five people were injured

When the explosion erupted, the phone line in Robert Shaffer's house went dead. He and his brother, Gladsby Shaffer, and his brother-in-law, John Gallagher, all senior citizens, hobbled out of the farm house, Robert Shaffer on crutches, Gallagher using a cane.

"Here were these three elderly men running up the hill for their lives," said Gail Shaffer, who rushed to the scene a short time later from Albany after hearing a radio report that there had been an explosion near Westkill Road in Blenheim. Gail Shaffer knew the area well. It was her home.

"There was enormous cloud of black smoke, and they thought the house and the barn would be gone, and they would be, too," she said.

Fortunately for them, however, the two Shaffer brothers and Gallagher escaped serious harm that day, though Gail Shaffer said she believes her father and one of her uncles suffered mild heart attacks during the ensuing pandemonium.

Having just finished his morning coffee, Robert Hitchcock, Blenheim's former fire chief and the town's highway superintendent, was on his way to work as a milk inspector for Tuscan Farms, as the gas emergency unfolded.

He was standing outside his car on Route 30, frantically waving his arms to warn motorists away from the area, when the propane cloud around him burst into flames, burning the clothes on his body and vaporizing his shoes. With serious burns all over his body, he was rushed to a hospital burn unit in Westchester County but died within 24 hours. Riding in another vehicle, his then 16-year-old daughter, Roberta, also received burn injuries, but survived.

"Bobby was one of these guys who went out of their way to help people," Blenheim native Jim Grippin later told The Daily Star. "It didn't matter what it was."

Also killed was Richard Smith, 43, of Central Bridge, who was driving through North Blenheim when the explosion ripped through the hamlet.

The toll of destruction could have been far worse. Survivors of the incident recalled that moments before the blast, a bus load of children from the Gilboa-Conesville School District passed through the pocket of propane vapor.

EARLY FEARS AND WARNINGS

Many local residents had resisted the pipeline when the project was announced in the 1960s. But easements were obtained through eminent domain, and the farms and fields of the region were sliced through by the Texas Eastern project, Gail Shaffer noted.

Following the disaster, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that the pipeline operator could not immediately pinpoint the source of the leaking propane because the nearest monitoring station was in Gilbertsville in Otsego County — nearly 70 miles from Blenheim.

The company insisted the explosion was a freak event most likely caused by flaws in the design of the pipe. But the NTSB blamed the rupture on the company's lack of oversight of its workers, finding that the employees left a section of pipe propped at an angle on a wooden skid after completing repair work, causing it to leak gas.

Texas Eastern, whose pipeline was later purchased by Enterprise Products Partners in 2009, installed monitoring devices at pump stations and receiving stations along the pipeline stretching 4200 miles from Texas to Albany County, to check for pressure fluctuations.

The 1990 disaster would not be the only scare involving the Texas Eastern pipeline. A leak in the same line triggered an explosion in Davenport in January 2004, destroying a house near Quaker Hill Road and Parker Schoolhouse Road. That incident was linked to a frost heaving that separated a valve from the pipe.

"The whole sky lit up bright orange," a witness, Brian Goodspeed of West Oneonta, who was on a call for Scavo's Garage, told The Daily Star after the Davenport explosion.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM TRAGEDY

Gail Shaffer said she believes the propane pipeline was not buried deeply enough in the ground, subjecting it to potential damage during frost heaves. She noted she made that point when she spoke out at a hearing on the proposed Constitution Pipeline, a proposed natural gas transmission system that would run 124 miles from Pennsylvania into the Schoharie County town of Wright.

Federal officials have pointed out that after the North Blenheim explosion, the Department of Transportation stepped up pipeline inspections and formed the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration and created a new requirement that pipelines be designed for internal inspections. Another safety feature to come out of the Blenheim tragedy is the "call before you dig" information system designed to safeguard pipelines from third party damage.

But Gail Shaffer, who has since moved back to Blenheim, said the industry and the government have not done enough to protect rural communities from what she called the inherent hazards of pipelines carrying flammable fuels.

Shaffer said the region dodged a bullet during the Hurricane Irene-triggered flooding disaster in August 2011, as a section of the propane pipeline was showing above ground near a stream bed.

"The rocks and the huge trees could have easily broken that pipeline," she said. "It was damaged significantly. It was just miraculous we didn't have an explosion along with that flood."

The U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration said in recent years it has gotten tougher with pipeline operators who flout safety standards in managing the 2.6 million miles of pipeline that crisscross the country. The agency reported last April that since 2009 it has proposed more than $33 million in civil penalties against pipeline operators, $10 million more than the amount proposed in the previous five years combined.

It also reported that there has been a 45 percent drop in pipeline incidents resulting in fatalities or major injuries since 2009.

'THEY KNOW WE DON'T HAVE A LOT OF POWER'

In Blenheim, however, Gail Shaffer said despite the litany of serious pipeline incidents across the nation since the Texas Eastern explosion, the federal government has not been aggressive enough in protecting citizens from the dangers associated with the infrastructure of the industry. The reason, she said, is "the cozy relationship" between federal regulators and the petroleum companies, with the regulators seeing their job description as serving the companies, not the public.

"It's almost like they (the companies) zero in on the most rural communities because they know we don't have a lot of power," Shaffer said.

Some residents who lost their homes in the 1990 fire never returned to Blenheim — a town whose population had dwindled from some 3,000 residents in the mid-19th century to less than 300 by the time of the pipeline incident.

Today, a quarter-century after the disaster, Blenheim residents have not forgotten the supreme sacrifice made by their former fire chief, Bobby Hitchcock. Subsequent to the tragedy, a new town hall and firehouse was built, using money donated by Texas Eastern. The new building was named the Robert L. Hitchcock Municipal Building.

"If it hadn't been for Bobby, more people would have been killed," Gail Shaffer said. "He stood out there knowing what the danger was. I literally get tears in my eyes whenever Bobby Hitchock is mentioned."

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