By Associated Press and Abbe Smith, Register Staff

MIDDLETOWN — Officials believe all workers who were on the site of the Kleen Energy Systems explosion Sunday have been accounted for, but could not state with certainty that the fatality count will remain at five.

Mayor Sebastian Giuliano said at a news conference this afternoon that a list of workers assigned to the plant on Sunday was compiled by interviewing workers and others, and that everyone on the list is accounted for, but he sounded a note of caution, saying rescue crews had been unable to get to all areas of the plant.

 “We assume that the list we’re given and the names match. You are not sure until you’ve searched everything. They won’t leave anything unturned,” Giuliano said.

 

South Fire District Deputy Chief Marc Fongemie said, “I can’t be 100 percent” that all the dead have been accounted for. “All I know is all the names have been matched.”

Late this afternoon, Middletown police identified the victims as Peter Chetulis of Thomaston, Ronald J. Crabb of Colchester, Raymond Dobratz of Old Saybrook, Roy Rushton of Hamilton, Ontario, and Chris Walters of Florissant, Mo.

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Search-and-rescue crews declared a section of the power plant too unstable to comb through today. Deputy Fire Marshal Al Santostefano said he didn’t know when rescue crews would be able to search the small section of the plant that was unstable but said everyone having been accounted for was good news. Continued...

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“We needed something to lift spirits around here, and that definitely did it,” he said.

The five bodies were removed from the site today with a police motorcade. Police had guarded the site overnight.

Giuliano described the blast site as “like Chernobyl,” referring to a 1986 disaster when a nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded. Welders were on site today to make it safe for recovery crews to enter. The explosion occurred between two turbines.

“I still don’t know what happened,” Giuliano said. “If it’s a design flaw in the plan, it’s one thing. If it’s human error, that’s something else.”

The state police major crime unit is working with the state fire marshal as the lead agencies investigating possible criminal negligence that led to the huge explosion, which could be heard and felt for miles.

Officials have ruled out terrorism and intentional criminal actions, but the site is being treated as a crime scene. The only other investigators allowed on the site are the Middletown Fire Department, the South Fire District, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The explosion occurred as workers were purging gas lines, but the exact cause remained under investigation. Giuliano said the city was told that all industry standards were followed in conducting the test.

Asked if there was anything citizens could do to help, Giuliano said, “You can just pray for these people. It can’t hurt. You can always do that.”

On the site, piles of rubble stood 10 feet high in some places, Santostefano said.

“I lost a couple of good friends up there,” Michael Rosario, a representative of the local Plumbers and Pipefitters union, said as he broke down crying today. Continued...

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“We hug our families, kiss our children. ... We go to work and we want to come home at the end of the day, safe,” he said. “That didn’t happen for a few people yesterday.”

Gov. M. Jodi Rell announced this afternoon she is assembling a panel of state agencies – to be led by Senior U.S. District Judge Alan H. Nevas – to identify the cause and origin of the Kleen Energy explosion, including possible construction problems, worker safety issues and licensing or permitting issues.

Rell said she is forming a second group of state agencies, local officials and experts to review the disaster and the findings of the Nevas-led panel and other investigations. The second panel will determine whether any changes should be made to Connecticut laws, state and local regulations or building and fire codes to protect both workers and residents living in the areas surrounding construction projects.

“Our response to the Middletown explosion must follow two distinct but critical paths,” Rell said. “We must first identify what went wrong and then determine every measure we can take to prevent future catastrophes. The reviews must be thorough, impartial and swift. And if there are concrete steps we can take in the meantime, we must be equally swift in putting those new measures into place.”

Rell said the Nevas panel will include representatives from the state departments of Environmental Protection, Labor, Consumer Protection and Public Utility Control, and the state police (including the state fire marshal's and state building inspector's offices).

The blast left huge pieces of metal that once encased the plant peeling off its sides. A large swath of the structure was blackened and surrounded by debris, but the building, its roof and its two smokestacks were still standing at the site, which is near Wesleyan University on a wooded and hilly 137-acre parcel of land overlooking the Connecticut River.

A team sent by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, a federal agency that investigates industrial chemical accidents, arrived at the site Monday but was turned away by local police, said Daniel Horowitz, the agency’s spokesman.

U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2, said he was told a judge signed a jurisdictional warrant giving the police and local fire department the right to control the property, and that members of the congressional delegation and the governor’s office were working together to “navigate the jurisdictional lines” defining who can be at the site.

“We want to make sure all critical agencies get to do their job,” said Courtney, who visited the site on Monday.

The nearly completed 620-megawatt plant is being built to produce energy primarily using natural gas, which accounts for about a fifth of the nation’s electricity. Workers for the construction company, O&G Industries Inc., a Torringon-based general contractor for the Kleen Energy project, were purging a gas line, clearing it of air, when the explosion occurred around 11:15 a.m. Sunday, Santostefano said. Continued...

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Santostefano said workers were at the site Sunday because they were trying to get the plant open on time — the opening was slated for sometime in the middle of 2010 — but added: “It wasn’t like they were working in a frenzy.”

Melissa Brady, a spokeswoman for Middlesex Hospital, said it treated 26 patients, 21 of whom were released Sunday. Three were admitted to Middlesex and two with severe injuries were transferred, one to Yale-New Haven Hospital and one to Hartford Hospital. She said most had injuries characteristic of being thrown or in an explosion, such as broken bones and bruises.

They were all expected to survive, she said, and most of the injuries were to extremities.

Kleen Energy Systems LLC began construction on the plant in February 2008. It had signed a deal with Connecticut Light and Power for the electricity produced by the plant, and would be one of the biggest built in New England in the last few years.

The company is run by former City Councilman William Corvo. Messages left at Corvo’s home were not returned. Calls to Gordon Holk, general manager of Power Plant Management Services, which has a contract to manage the plant, also weren’t returned.

OSHA records show there was a planned inspection on July 28, 2009, for work being performed by O&G Industries. There was one violation, listed as “other,” relating to recordkeeping and reporting. John Chavez, an OSHA spokesman, says records show O&G settled the matter informally by paying the $1,000 fine.

“Relatively speaking, they do appear to have a pretty clean record,” Chavez said.

Energy Investors Funds, a private equity fund that indirectly owns a majority share in the power plant, said it was cooperating with authorities.

Safety board investigators have done extensive work on the issue of gas line purging since an explosion last year at a Slim Jim factory in North Carolina killed four people. They’ve identified other explosions caused by workers who were unsafely venting gas lines inside buildings.

Kleen Energy

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