People in Longview, Wash., have been waiting for what feels like forever for something to go terribly wrong in one of the paper mills that line the Columbia River.
The plants that fuel the economy in southwest Washington came for the ample timber in the Pacific Northwest’s mountains, the cheap electricity powered by the region’s mighty rivers and the ocean access at the Columbia’s mouth. But they rely on technology that is dangerous, expensive to maintain and dependent on potentially toxic chemicals. They also belong to companies pressed to cut costs in response to rising prices and economic uncertainty in global markets.
So the tank failure at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging facility that killed at least two people Tuesday and left another nine missing and presumed dead saddened this community far more than it shocked them. Now they have a new worry — what will become of the plant and its 550 employees?
“Everything is stretched so thin, of course it’s going to break,” said Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat whose district includes the plant. “This is systemic.”
Longview, 45 miles north of Portland and about 120 miles south of Seattle, was founded as a company town by the timber baron R.A. Long during the logging boom of the early 20th century. R.A. Long High School maintains the Lumberjacks and Lumberjills as its mascots.
Longview and Kelso next door are tight-knit, small communities. Many mill jobs are multigenerational. At least one of the people killed in the explosion, Gilbert Bernal, had a son who also worked at the plant.
“These workers are not strangers to one another,” said Josh Estes, a former mill worker and spokesman for the union that represents Nippon Dynawave employees. “Many have worked side by side for decades, raised families together and built their lives around this mill.”
Unlike many Pacific Northwest timber towns, Longview did not collapse when federal protections for the northern spotted owl sharply reduced logging on federal lands in the 1990s, accelerating timber’s decline. It somehow weathered economic globalization over the past decade that obliterated jobs and shuttered dozens of pulp and paper mills as production consolidated.
“What have we lost, seven mills across three states just last year?” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez asked.
Instead, Longview evolved, embracing large-scale industrial work along the riverfront. Today, nearly one in five jobs in Cowlitz County is tied to manufacturing, and much of the work involves either turning Northwest logs into paper products or putting them on trains and boats.
That shift kept Longview economically viable, but it also brought risk. Competition has increased pressure to produce on tighter budgets. The remaining mills rely on huge machines and hazardous chemicals, including “white liquor,” a caustic mixture used to turn wood chips into paper pulp.
Workers at the Nippon Dynawave factory turned wood pulp into bleached liquid paperboard packaging, used in milk and juice cartons. The tank that ruptured Tuesday held 600,000 gallons of white liquor before the explosion and 25,000 gallons after the blast, according to rescue officials.
Some spilled into the Columbia River; some entered the nearby storm water drainage system — environmental regulators are not sure how much or where the rest went, though they have said there is no air quality risk and no risk to the local water supply.
“These companies, they’re like sleeping demons,” said Jeremy Whiton, who works in shipping at the North Pacific Paper Company plant just down Industrial Way from the Nippon Dynawave facility.
Mr. Whiton said he and his co-workers are “hardcore people” who understand the risks.
“But every day I go in and every day I leave, it’s a blessing,” he said.
State and federal regulators are investigating the disaster, which Gov. Bob Ferguson described as possibly the worst industrial accident in Washington’s modern history, and it may be months before a precise cause is determined. A sign outside the plant on Wednesday boasted of 100 straight “safe days” inside, though the facility had a history of smaller but notable safety incidents, including a 2023 fire that burned for several days in a chip storage and conveyance area about a mile from the site of this week’s explosion.
Melissa Cozadd, who lives nearby and is related to one of the workers presumed dead, said “stuff is constantly happening over there.”
A Nippon Dynawave executive, Brian Wood, said Wednesday that the company would “cooperate to the maximum extent that we can” with any investigations.
Ms. Cozadd echoed a number of family members who said they want someone to be held accountable. She said she hoped “that place gets shut down” and that the Japanese company that owns Nippon Dynawave would be forced to “make sure all these kids and parents are taken care of for the rest of their lives.”
But that raises other fears.
The plants that remain in Longview still provide some of the best-paying blue collar jobs in southwest Washington, supporting families who have worked along the riverfront for generations. The risks that come with those jobs are as familiar as the sulfur-rich smell of paper manufacturing that lingers near the river.
On Wednesday night, that smell was “way stronger than normal,” Joey Ford, who lives near the plant, said while walking his dog. “You can smell something went wrong.”
Mr. Ford said he was not sure what to expect next at the facility.
“It could be the beginning of the end if something else happened,” he said. “That would turn people away from working there. No money is worth your life.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Anna Griffin is the Pacific Northwest bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Washington, Idaho, Alaska, Montana and Oregon.
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