Most toilet paper, tissues, paper towels and napkins start out as woodchips. At mills like Woodland Pulp, on the Canadian border in Washington County, they get cooked and broken down to a brown mush. Then Shawn Howland’s job starts.
He and the rest of the crew in the bleach plant make the pulp white by running it through washers and adding chlorine dioxide. Then it can be processed into paper products.
The employees are regularly exposed to several different toxic chemicals. It’s part of the job.
A common practice in paper mills in Maine and elsewhere is to wear a personal monitor that specifically detects hydrogen sulfide, which can be produced during pulp manufacturing and is odorless, colorless and deadly at high concentrations.
Howland said he has lobbied four different superintendents for the monitors, which are small and clip onto their clothes, over his 27 years in the bleach plant.
“Since Day One that I’ve been down here, they’ve been something that we should have had,” he said.
At Woodland Pulp, though, Howland said his requests were denied by various corporate owners. He knew the potential for danger existed, but there were only a couple of instances in more than three decades total at the mill where hydrogen sulfide had been a problem. He said over all that time, “you kind of lose focus and you kind of forget.”
“To be honest, we’ve been lucky. And our luck ran out,” he said.
It ran out on Jan. 27. As employees were preparing to temporarily shut down the mill to avoid financial losses, hydrogen sulfide built up in a sewer line and leaked into the bleach plant.
Howland and 11 other employees were exposed. Two of them didn’t survive.
Six months later, a clearer picture has emerged of what happened that day. Government inspectors recently detailed a list of failures that led to the deaths of 20-year-old intern Kasie Malcolm and 26-year-old engineer Allen Hornberger.
Howland believes any number of safety measures — including personal gas monitors — would’ve saved the two young men. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board noted the company didn’t provide the monitors, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed four willful citations.
The gas leak has cost Woodland Pulp and the investment firm that owns it, International Grand Investment Corporation, $16 million in property damage, the Chemical Safety Board found, which includes loss of use. The owners declined to comment. That figure is separate from the nearly $800,000 in proposed fines OSHA issued, and any penalties that may result from future lawsuits by the families of the victims.
The personal gas monitors for the dozens of employees who needed them cost about $100 each, said Michael Higgins, a representative for United Steelworkers, which supports paper and pulp workers across the state.
He and Howland agree the deaths were preventable, and they are turning their grief into action.
As the local USW union president on site, Howland is working with upper managers to install so many new safety systems that Howland said, “This isn’t the same building that it was on January 27.”
The incident opened a lot of eyes at paper mills across Maine and the country, Higgins said, and it opened his own to the risks people face in other industries he represents.
OSHA documented 31 worksite deaths from hydrogen sulfide between 2020-2024. A lot of them happened in enclosed spaces, or around hazardous waste, or both, in jobs that included oil and gas operations, wastewater, and washing tankers.
Yet, Higgins said OSHA doesn’t require personal gas monitors, so he’s planning to push for state legislation next year.
“If you’re an employer that uses chemicals that could produce an immediate danger to life and health,” he said, “it should be mandatory that you provide your employees that work around that with personal monitoring.”
“Maybe it’ll start the ball rolling across the country,” he said.
New priority on safety
In May, Howland got on a stage in Pittsburgh and spoke about what he witnessed at the Washington County mill where he’s worked since 1994. His speech was part of a health, safety and environment conference that USW puts on every couple of years.
Howland spoke from memory and from the heart, without notes.
He and others who work at the mill have gone over and over January’s gas leak in their minds, through sleepless nights, meetings, counseling sessions and in quiet moments at home alone.
He’s told the story to investigators from several agencies, to his family, and to coworkers who weren’t in the mill that day.
In Pittsburgh, he told it to USW members and paper industry managers from various states. Higgins said the audience was listening closely.
Just after midday on Jan. 27, on the first floor of the bleach plant, an electrician working near Howland suddenly took off running. The man was overcome with hydrogen sulfide gas, and though he didn’t know what it was, he knew he had to get out of the building. The gas causes coughing, itchy eyes, and staggering. The electrician collapsed briefly. Howland helped him up and into the fresh air outside.
Then Howland and three other operators put on respirators, grabbed a handheld gas meter, and went back in to try to figure out what the problem was.
The hydrogen sulfide reading maxed out the meter. It was at least four or five times the lethal dose, he said.
The bleach plant workers all got out in time and recovered. But two other employees — Malcolm, an intern from the University of Maine, and Hornberger, an engineer who’d started five months earlier — had been on the second floor working on a project.
Howland, who was a senior person on site that day, didn’t know they were in the building. Higgins said Malcolm and Hornberger walked right into a big plume of hydrogen sulfide gas and had no idea it was there.
Malcolm died hours later, while Hornberger was treated in the Intensive Care Unit.
Within the next few days, Woodland Pulp employees got the personal monitors, known as “crickets.” The mill also installed fixed hydrogen sulfide meters, which Howland said are even more important because if one sounds anywhere in the four-story bleach plant, it alerts everyone to get out and tells others not to enter.
Also, the alarm system has been revamped, Howland said, and as an operator in charge of the bleach plant, he’s now aware of who’s in the building.
After Malcolm and Hornberger inhaled the hydrogen sulfide, they were on the floor for about four hours until one of their roommates called the mill because they had planned to go to the gym together, Howland said.
Federal investigators faulted the company for not having a system that would’ve accounted for every employee, and could’ve given them a chance to survive.
Malcolm and Hornberger’s project on Jan. 27 was unrelated to the shutdown procedure, and Howland said if anyone had asked him, he said he would’ve told them not to come inside the bleach plant that day.
“It’s just not a place to be if you’re not experienced,” he said, and if you don’t know where you are. “These two guys hadn’t been in the mill long enough to be aware of their surroundings.”
Howland is working with management to install a system where people coming in will wear wristbands with an electronic fob that reports where people are.
He said he can’t believe the mill operated for so long without the kinds of safety measures the company and employees are now prioritizing.
“If we had had any one of these protocols on that day, they would still be alive,” he said.
Cultural problems
Employees’ requests for personal gas monitors predated the current owners. Howland said that managers on the ground at Woodland Pulp are in a hard spot. The message they get is: “Keep the mill running, but we’re not going to give you the money to fix anything. That’s been the culture here for a long time,” he said, even before International Grand Investment Corporation bought the mill in 2010.
The series of events that caused hydrogen sulfide to build up in a sewer pipe started about six months earlier with an issue that the mill did not make the proper investment to solve, Howland said.
It involved acidity readings in a sewer pipe that runs the length of three football fields from the bleach plant to the wastewater treatment facility on site. Woodland Pulp’s system broke, and the Chemical Safety Board found the company decided to use a back-up system.
Howland said he didn’t know it at the time, but the result was that the acidity readings were about 1,000 feet away from where the new system would automatically trigger the release of chemicals to fix a problem it detected.
That distance, he said, caused too much of a chemical to be added, and caused a reaction that produced the hydrogen sulfide. Because employees were in the process of shutting down the mill, they’d stopped a scrubber fan that would normally help clean the air. The Chemical Safety Board found the gas leaked out into the bleach plant through holes, some of which should have been plugged.
Higgins believes the mill’s corporate owners didn’t provide the money needed to properly fix the system when it broke last year. But after the gas leak, they put things back where they belonged, he said.
International Grand Investment Corporation’s directors are based in Taiwan and Hong Kong, according to filings where it’s registered in Delaware. Most other paper mills in Maine have foreign ownership, too. As the industry has shrunk dramatically over the past few decades, foreign investment has enabled them to keep operating.
Higgins said other off-shore owners “don’t seem to have the same dynamic” as exists at Woodland Pulp in Baileyville. He doesn’t think the owners intend to put employees in dangerous situations, “but sometimes that’s the consequence of not providing the resources they need to be safe,” he said.
A company spokesman did not respond to the union’s assertions about the lack of funding for maintenance or personal gas meters, and told the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram that it would be inappropriate to comment while investigations are ongoing.
Hanging over all of this is the volatility in the pulp market and questions about whether Woodland Pulp could close like so many other paper mills in Maine. Its annual sales are about $60 million, according to an Environmental Protection Agency report, and Malcolm’s and Hornberger’s parents are still consulting an attorney about how to get justice for their deaths.
The USW leaders believe there have been positive changes in management that will promote safety. “The culture is trying to change,” Howland said. They’ve established a joint union-company safety committee, and the company paid for 10 people to go to USW’s health and safety conference in May where they got tips on how to run it. There are six unions represented at Woodland Pulp, and USW is the largest.
Howland said employees, including him, have felt a lot of guilt over Malcolm’s and Hornberger’s deaths.
“I wouldn’t wish this on anybody,” he said. He’s also haunted by the fact that instead of two people, he believes “this easily could’ve been 12.”
At the safety conference where Howland spoke, he was shocked at how few paper mills nationwide provide personal gas monitors. “It’s, at best, 50-50,” Howland said after seeing the results of a survey the union did.
Linda Deane, who worked in paper mills in Jay and Rumford for several decades before retiring in 2021, said in the bleach plants she was required to wear one. Currently, employees at the Sappi facility in Skowhegan and Nine Dragons in Rumford have them, Higgins said, adding that Woodland Pulp’s purchase brings it in line with the rest of the industry in Maine.
As eye-opening as the deaths in January have been, they have provided a reminder that even after a tragedy, lessons can get forgotten over time or distance. As federal investigators interviewed union members after the gas leak, Higgins, who sat in on the interviews, said they kept asking longtime employees about an eerily similar incident that happened a quarter century earlier in Alabama, when two contractors died of hydrogen sulfide exposure at a paper mill.
Higgins said in the interviews, the employees didn’t remember it.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Rachel Estabrook can be reached at restabrook@metln.org.