A storage tank holding roughly 900,000 gallons of industrial-grade caustic liquid collapsed Tuesday inside a Pacific Northwest paper mill, killing at least one worker, leaving nine others unaccounted for, and trapping emergency crews in a prolonged and dangerous recovery operation that stretched deep into the evening.
The implosion struck Nippon Dynawave Packaging Co. along the Columbia River in Longview, a timber-and-paper city of about 38,000 where the facility has been operating since 1953. Nine additional workers were injured, a number of them severely. A responding firefighter was among the casualties.
Hours after the collapse, with some of the corrosive liquid still pooled inside the wreckage, rescue teams could not yet reach potential victims.
“The tank remains unstable, creating hazardous conditions for emergency personnel,” the Longview Fire Department said in a statement released Tuesday evening, noting that crews were focused on reinforcing the structure before any further recovery work could safely proceed.
The substance involved — known in the pulp industry as white liquor — is a mixture of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide used with heat to break down raw wood into kraft paper, the heavy-duty material found in packaging and shopping bags. It is intensely corrosive. Some victims sustained burns. Others suffered inhalation injuries. The range of conditions ran from minor to critical, authorities confirmed, and the sheer volume of liquid that had been inside the tank — authorities initially estimated 80,000 gallons before correcting themselves to more than ten times that figure — complicated every calculation responders made on the ground.
Battalion Chief Mike Gorsuch of the Longview Fire Department deployed roughly 40 firefighters and paramedics to what he characterized as a mass casualty scene. A regional hazmat team joined them to decontaminate patients before transport to hospitals in Longview and Vancouver, Washington. The white liquor that escaped the collapsed tank ran into a nearby drainage ditch, triggering a response from Washington state’s Ecology Department, which sent an assessment team to the site.
The cause of the implosion was not immediately known, and Cowlitz Fire and Rescue Chief Scott Goldstein said it was too early to speculate. But Goldstein acknowledged the weight of the moment for every person in uniform working the scene. The mill employs around 1,000 people in a community that has revolved around paper and lumber since a Kansas City timber baron founded Longview in the 1920s. Goldstein noted that many of the firefighters knew people inside the plant — as colleagues, as neighbors, as family.
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Outside the facility’s visitor entrance, people gathered through the afternoon, looking for word on workers they had not heard from. They did not speak to reporters. At a union hall designated as a family assistance center nearby, three women held each other in tears before going inside.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray called the event an absolute tragedy and said her thoughts were with families who had lost someone and with those still waiting for news.
Nippon Dynawave is a subsidiary of Japan’s Nippon Paper Group. Its Longview plant produces tissue, printing paper, cups, plates and packaging cartons, and it sits within a broader industrial corridor shared by timber, chemical and paper operations along the river. It is not a peripheral employer. It is, by most measures, central to what Longview is.
The company’s regulatory record offers limited but notable context. Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries has cited Nippon Dynawave three times for health and safety violations since early 2021, issuing fines totaling $3,400. One citation involved workers not wearing required face coverings. Another found an employee working without fall protection on a platform more than four feet off the ground. A third arose after equipment linked to a workplace accident — in which a worker lost a finger — was moved before state investigators could examine it.
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Two separate safety complaints were filed against the company earlier this year, in March and May. The department said both remain open and are unrelated to Tuesday’s event. One involved a valve on an aqua ammonia clarifier tank — not the tank that collapsed. The other was triggered by a sinkhole from a failed drain.
The collapse arrived against a grim national backdrop. Across Southern California, thousands of residents remained displaced Tuesday because of a damaged chemical tank at an aerospace plant. And a 2023 report from a coalition of environmental justice organizations found that more than 40 people died in hazardous chemical incidents across the United States between January 2021 and mid-October of that year.
In Longview on Tuesday night, the tank was still not stable. The search was still not over.