On Friday, after reading news coverage of the federal report into the Robbins Lumber fire and silo explosion that hospitalized a dozen people, a friend and fellow firefighter reached out to Prent Marriner, the chief of the Appleton fire department.
Both men had responded to the blaze on May 15. Marriner, one of nine first responders injured in the disaster, credits the friend with saving his life. Three mill employees also were injured while another firefighter was killed in the blast.
“This is a guy who — I wouldn’t have walked away if it wasn’t for him. I don’t know if I’d still be alive if it wasn’t for him,” Marriner said.
We went from “heroes to zeros” real quick, the friend told Marriner.
The report, released Friday by the federal National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health nearly three months after the fatal May 15 fire at Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, details factors that led to the explosion. The document notes the silo was designed to seal out airflow from the outside, and that spraying water inside it to put out a fire could let in oxygen and pose a explosion risk.
One firefighter, Andrew Cross of Belmont, was killed when the rapid ignition of combustible dust inside the silo caused the silo to shoot into the air and then fall back to earth in a ball of flame that engulfed firefighters, ambulance personnel, mill workers and emergency vehicles. Two of the injured — Assistant Searsmont Fire Chief Wayne Woodbury and mill co-owner Alden Robbins — later died from their injuries.
Many first responders felt blamed and “beat up,” Marriner said, by the media’s focus on the federal investigation’s finding that firefighting tactics unwittingly contributed to the explosion. What got less attention is that firefighters had not been informed of the specific risks of the type of silo that caught fire, as the federal report detailed, Marriner said.
Bill Gillespie, Liberty’s fire chief who managed the Robbins Lumber fire scene for 32 hours as the incident commander, shares the same point of view. Like Marriner, he does not dispute the findings of the federal report, but he does take issue with how the investigators’ findings were reported by the media, which he found insensitive and incomplete.
“Our frustration is with the headlines in bold letters saying that we contributed to the death of our friends and family members,” Gillespie said. “I don’t have to say how much that stings the firefighters … that spent 30 plus hours fighting that fire in hellish conditions. That hurts a little bit when we’re being blamed.”
The reaction, by both the media and some members of the public to the NIOSH report, showed a lack of understanding of the purpose of the report, the men said. The purpose of such reports is to help prevent similar tragedies from happening and are an important training tool for firefighters, Marriner and Gillespie said separately.
At the same time, the report and the Searsmont incident as a whole, have underscored the constrained circumstances that affect firefighters, who have limited access to training and who make personal sacrifices for very little compensation, the chiefs said. Fire officials from the local and state level have been meeting for weeks and intend to propose legislation this fall that would strengthen support and training for firefighters, Gillespie said.
The Maine Office of State Fire Marshal declined to comment on the report or its findings because it was not conducted by its office.
Firefighters and EMTs have been working to heal mentally and physically from the disaster, according to Marriner. But the reporting of and public reaction to the NIOSH findings reopened some of those wounds.
“To just kind of have that scab ripped off again by people saying, ‘Oh, you didn’t know what you were doing.’ It was tough,” Marriner said.
Firefighters previously had used water to fight fires at a different silo at the lumber yard without incident, Marriner said. Crucially, they did not realize that the silo that was on fire on May 15 had a different design and was sealed to keep out oxygen. No one, mill employees or firefighters, knew that adding oxygen to this particular silo would create what the report called an “explosive mixture,” both Gillespie and Marriner said.
Even the lumber mill employees who had worked around the silo for decades, as well as two of its owners that were on the scene helping direct firefighters, were unaware of the specific risks that silo posed, Marriner said.
“If the mill employees didn’t know enough to tell us that it’s an oxygen-limiting silo, and the hazards that they have, how are we going to prepare for that?” Marriner said.
Marriner was quick to point out that he was not blaming Robbins Lumber or the Robbins family. The company has always been “proactive” in letting the fire service know about any hazards and helping to answer questions and solve problems, he said.
He doesn’t know where the information breakdown happened, he said.
The silo was not new when purchased, but had been previously used, according to the federal report, and it’s unclear why and at what point the information about its potential risks fell through the cracks.
The Robbinses were very “hands on” with their business and with safety, Marriner said. So much so that two of the company’s co-owners, Alden Robbins and Jim A. Robbins, were badly injured when the silo exploded. Alden Robbins died from his injuries six weeks later, on July 2.
“They very easily could have gotten in the car and driven away and let the fire department and the managers deal with it,” Marriner said of the Robbins brothers.
The fact that the fire was burning very close to a large amount of explosive fuel has also been underappreciated, Gillespie said. As the report states, the body of Andrew Cross, the Morrill firefighter who died at the scene, was not recovered for two hours after the silo exploded. It took firefighters that long to be able to safely get close to him.
“There was an extremely large fire load with 30,000 gallons of explosive fuel,” Gillespie said. “And we couldn’t sacrifice other firefighters to recover what we felt was the body of someone that wouldn’t have survived the blast, based on the injuries of the others.”
For Marriner, the most important takeaway from the report and the Robbins fire itself is that fire departments and firefighters — whether paid staff or volunteers — need more support and training.
“There has to be a bigger look at how we do training for the fire service statewide,” he said.
There is no centralized academy for firefighters like there is a police academy in Maine, he noted. Some firefighters in his department have been trying for two years to get available slots in one class, he said.
Another issue is structural. Firefighters increasingly have to work two or three jobs, because of the state of the economy, which means they have less time to spend in training or responding to emergencies, Marriner said.
Firefighters on many volunteer departments make less than minimum wage, he said. Appleton has been able to raise the pay to about $19 per hour, which firefighters are paid while responding to calls and during training. But the department is unable to pay people for longer-term training, some of which takes 200 hours to complete, he said.
Some firefighters pay for their own courses. Others use their vacation time from their other jobs to attend them, Marriner said.
“What we need is a way to find a balance where it’s not such a cost on the person volunteering to be able to provide the service – and provide the service as safely as possible for themselves, the people they’re working with and the people they’re trying to help.”
Gillespie, who is President of the Maine Fire Chiefs’ Association, said he and other municipal and state fire officials are discussing several options for strengthening the fire service, including creating a state fire academy, boosting fire training capacity in the state, and financially supporting firefighters as they pursue training.
No matter what form any legislative proposal may take, “any solution is going to involve throwing some money at it,” Marriner said — but it would be money well spent.
“These are the people that you’re asking to go rescue your kid or your grandma or put out a fire,” Marriner said. “People certainly aren’t here for the money because there isn’t any. But I think we need to get to a point where we can at least make it feasible for people to get the training that will help save other lives and help save their own lives as well.”