Desperate Search for Victims of Explosion in Connecticut

Desperate Search for Victims of Explosion in Connecticut
By RAY RIVERA
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: February 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/nyregion/08victims.html?th&emc=th


MIDDLETOWN, Conn. — Search and rescue crews worked through the icy night and into Monday morning to look for possible survivors who might be buried in the wreckage at the site of a power plant where hours earlier an explosion rocked this central Connecticut college town.

A Middletown deputy fire marshal, Al Santostefano, told The Associated Press that rescuers had not been able to penetrate an unstable section of the power plant, so officials could not say yet whether there would be other victims. As of Sunday night they had counted five dead and more than two dozen with unspecified injuries.

The efforts to account for victims and survivors were being frustrated by a sheer absence of information about how many people were working at the site, where construction crews were completing work on the power plant being built by Kleen Energy Systems. City and state officials said as many as 100 to 200 might have been on the job when the explosion occurred Sunday morning, but other officials put the count as low as 50.

Officials said they believed many workers may have fled the scene unharmed. But dealing with an unknown number of contractors and subcontractors on the project, officials on Sunday night, more than seven hours after the explosion, still had no list of names of people who were supposed to have been on the job and who might still be missing.

“It’s one thing to say we don’t know who was on the job in the morning after the incident,” the Middletown mayor, Sebastian N. Giuliano, said at his office Sunday evening. “But at this stage of the game to still be fuddling around with this is extremely frustrating.”

The accident was one of the worst in memory in this town of about 45,000 people, where church steeples and old Colonial buildings are common and industrial smokestacks are rare. About 15 miles south of Hartford, the town is home to Wesleyan University. That the accident happened on Super Bowl Sunday was only adding to the confusion, Mr. Giuliano said.

“We’re trying to figure out who was on the site today and is home now, sitting at home watching the Super Bowl, and who might be still under the rubble,” Mr. Giuliano said.

Mr. Giuliano added that it was still unclear whether all the contractors involved in the project had been contacted, efforts that might also be hampered by the game. He was unsure how many contractors were even involved, he said.

At a family assistance center set up by the Red Cross at City Hall, a handful of people came throughout the day to look for information, and more people called, but it was not the flood of people that might be expected given the uncertainty of who might have been working.

Mark Brinkerhoff, a spokesman for the Middlesex County Red Cross, said the people calling in were looking for the same thing everyone else was: a list of names.

“It’s frustrating,” he said. “They’re calling the hospitals, hospitals tell them to call the police, police tell them to call the Red Cross; nobody has this information.”

The blast could be heard throughout the town and neighboring communities, breaking some windows near the site, officials said.

“It shook my whole house, and I live six and half miles from here,” said Essie Spencer, a Red Cross volunteer from Higganum, a small community south of Middletown. “We thought it was an earthquake or dynamite. It really shook. Every window in my house rattled. My dog freaked out.”

Watching the Super Bowl at a bar on Main Street in Middletown on Sunday evening, Jon Johnson, 38, said he learned of the explosion after seeing a flurry of posts on Facebook during a lunch break in Wallingford.

“The first message I saw was, ‘Don’t go to Middletown, it’s in chaos,’ ” said Mr. Johnson, who lives in Portland, across the Connecticut River from the plant. “I started asking, ‘What the heck happened?’ ”

But what confusion the blast had caused had calmed by evening. Even at the Red Cross center, volunteers were watching the game in the pauses between calls.

The release of the victims’ identities was being delayed until their relatives had been notified. The mayor said he expected that search-and-rescue efforts would continue into the morning and last as long as three days.

One victim was identified by friends and relatives as Raymond Dobratz, 57, a pipe fitter from nearby Old Saybrook, where he had also served for more than a decade on the Police Commission and the parks and recreation commission, and had been an officer with the Westbrook Elks Lodge.

“He’s a man who served the community for many, many years,” said Adam Stillman, of the Old Saybrook Democratic Town Committee. “Obviously his loss is a terrible tragedy.”

Mr. Dobratz had two adult sons and a wife who works as a nurse, said Richard Metsack, a friend who served with Mr. Dobratz on the police commission. Sometimes he would help his son with his small fishing charter business.

Mr. Dobratz had even once coached the town’s current chief of police in Little League.

“He just loved the town,” Mr. Metsack said.

Reporting was contributed by Robert Davey and Thomas Kaplan in Middletown, and Michael S. Schmidt and A. G. Sulzberger in New York.