Story Time!
This one is going to be, uh...A little different.
In honor of it having been twenty years since it happened, I figured I’d tell you guys about the Pipeline Explosion I Should Have Died In.
I was turning six that year, it happened in June, so I was five. June 10th, 1999.
Putting it under a read more to save your dash.
My sister and I were at our daycare -- She’s two years older than me and the daycare also had pre-school to 1st grade. Our stepdad was running late to pick us up, but it wasn’t a big deal to us. There were snacks, people to play with, a playground, grownups who didn’t mind staying late to watch us.
Now, this being 1999, no one really had cellphones yet. They existed, but they weren’t that widespread just yet. He’d called before heading out from someplace and they were just holding us there until he arrives -- about twenty or thirty minutes after the call.
He arrived, packed up the kids, we got out.
Normal day.
He had a bike that he used to get us all home -- I would ride on the back, my sister on the seat, him on the pedal. Balancing act. All fun and awesome. We went slowly.
On any other day, we would have stopped in the creek and played for a bit. Since he had been running late to get us, he was also running late to pick our mom up. The creek playing did not happen that day. We got within several blocks of our apartment and saw two guys pushing a car up a hill. We laughed about it for a second, then stopped in our tracks as an explosion and a mushroom cloud popped up in the distance.
Our first thought was that the car we’d seen had exploded.
We kept heading home.
It took another twenty minutes and when we walked in, the phone was ringing off the hook. It was my mom. She was practically crying over the phone and all I really remember was that my sister was suddenly pushing me into our room to pack some of my stuff into a bag. We packed up, got down to my stepdad’s truck, threw our stuff in and drove off.
It turned out that the creek we usually played in had been filled with gasoline by a failing pipeline and then a spark had been created. It was only a few blocks from our daycare, about eight blocks from our apartment, and my mom’s work had been evacuated. She’d stayed inside as long as possible to try and reach us. She’d seen a mushroom cloud over our daycare. Reminder: I was five, my sister was about to turn seven. Not quite two years between us, actually.
On the other side of my family, my dad’s mom carried a police scanner. She was a police reporter for years and a reporter at the time. My grandma had been hearing the news of three unidentified bodies, with no details other than the location everyone in the family knew we played. My dad couldn’t contact us, having only heard about it after we’d already gotten to the apartment and left again.
We picked up my mom, got to his house, settled in for the night to try and figure out what was happening.
Three kids had died. One of them had gone to school with my sort-of-brother.
If we hadn’t been running late, we would have been another three bodies in the creek.
I don’t really know why I’m telling this story other than trying to deal with the trauma. You’d think that twenty years would be enough time to get over something, right? But we could have and probably should have died back then.
After my dad and grandma found out that we were still alive, my dad refused to let us out of his sight for about a week and a half. My stepdad would randomly stop what he was doing and call out to us in the house (We moved in with him after the explosion) until we answered. My grandma had a treat box -- you behave or do an extra chore, you get a treat. After the explosion and finding us all alive, my sister and I got the entire box at once.
My mom followed us around for a long while, when she wasn’t at work and we weren’t at school.
Here, have some photos of the mushroom cloud and the exploded creek.
The cloud could be seen from the San Juan Islands.