Explosion cause unknown; neighbor saw building go up

WASILLA — Fire investigators are still looking into an explosion at a natural gas plant near Point MacKenzie but say it likely started in a trailer full of gas.

“What we do know is that there was a trailer in the building that was filled with gas and somehow the gas leaked out of it, and what we’re trying to find out now is what sparked the gas to cause the explosion,” said Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Megan Peters.

The facility on Ayrshire Road is the property of Fairbanks Natural Gas, which chills gas in order to liquefy it for transport to Fairbanks.

Nobody was hurt when the building exploded early Thursday morning, according to borough officials. A borough press release Thursday said the one resident who lives nearby self-evacuated. But if that resident was local dairy farmer Wayne Brost, and he thinks it was, that’s not quite accurate.

“We were going to evacuate, and when we found out it was the shop building and not the physical plant, and they said there was no imminent danger of any volume of supply going up, we just stayed there,” he said.

Brost said he only lives four-tenths of a mile from the plant.

“One of the guys that used to work there said, ‘If that thing ever goes up it’ll level your place,’ and I don’t know if that’s true or not, but we were worried,” Brost said.

He said he noticed the fire that morning, but wasn’t quite sure at first if it was a blaze or just lights from the facility. A prison guard from the nearby correctional farm stopped by making rounds and they decided it was likely a fire. So Brost called 911 and the guard went to check what was going on.

“We heard some small blasts after that fire got going. There was flames shooting up probably 100, 150 feet,” Brost said.

Borough firefighters were the first on scene, even though the facility sits outside the area where the borough provides fire service. By the time they got there, though, the building was already fully involved and firefighters made the decision just to keep it from spreading elsewhere and to let the building burn. Company employees moved quickly to shut off the plant’s natural gas supplies.

At some point a second explosion was reported. The final decision to pull back came after firefighters heard a third and final explosion. Borough officials think the last blast was likely from some fuel source — a barrel of diesel or tank of gas — inside the building.

Once investigators from the State Fire Marshal’s office made it to the scene, borough firefighters handed it over to them. Peters said they’re still investigating.

Dan Britton, president of Fairbanks Natural Gas, said the explosion didn’t interrupt company operations very long, if at all.

“We’re at about 50 percent production and expect to be back up to 100 percent by the end of the day,” he said Friday.

The fire was in the facility’s maintenance shop, which Britton said is not critical to any of the operations. None of the critical facilities were damaged.

Asked if he had any word on the cause, Britton said he didn’t

“It’s in the fire marshal’s hands,” he said.

According to the company’s website, once the gas is turned into a liquid in Wasilla it is trucked to Fairbanks then distributed to homes in an underground system. Fairbanks, the company states, doesn’t have a nearby source of gas nor does it have a pipeline running to the area. The company says it has more than 1,000 commercial and residential customers.

As far as fire service goes, the area has been a bit complicated for the borough, said Director of Emergency Services Dennis Brodigan. Borough buildings are covered — even if it takes an hour to get there, a truck will come from the Central Mat-Su Fire Department if, for instance, the Port MacKenzie offices burn.

But everything else is not, and the borough has been trying to come up with a solution. Should it start a whole new fire department for just the port area or for the whole community? Should it try and annex the vast expanse of Point MacKenzie into the neighboring Central Mat-Su Fire Department?

The natural gas plant sits just outside of that department’s fire service area, the boundary for which is Carpenter Lake Road, about a mile away.

“The people on the north side of that road are in the fire service area, the people on the south side are not,” Brodigan said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.