‘Everything was on fire.’ Report describes harrowing rescue in KY pipeline blast.
A sheriff’s deputy who rescued two people from the inferno touched off by a 2019 natural gas pipeline failure in Kentucky said the heat nearly drove him back from one woman, but he was able to carry her out of her burning house.
Colby Reik said the heat from the blast felt like an oven.
“It just blows my mind,” Reik said. “Everything around us was on fire.”
The dramatic account by Reik was included in thousands of pages of documents the National Transportation Safety Board released this week in its investigation of the Aug. 1, 2019 pipeline accident in Lincoln County.
Another report in the release said that the point where the pipeline ruptured was near two defects in the pipe. The agency has not ruled on the cause of the failure, and did not say the defects caused the rupture.
The reports the NTSB released cover a range of subjects, from metallurgical tests on pieces of the pipe blown out of the ground to the emergency response.
The pipeline failed at 1:23 a.m. on Aug. 1, 2019, sending a fireball hundreds of feet into the air as residents jarred from their sleep fled the flames.
The heat was so intense that it melted the siding on a house 1,100 feet from the blast crater, the NTSB said.
Lisa D. Derringer, 58, collapsed in the heat and died as she tried to get away. Her mobile home was just over 300 feet away from where the flames erupted from the ground.
A Kentucky medical examiner said Derringer died as a result of pulmonary barotrauma — damage to the lungs from rapid or excessive pressure changes — and burns, the NTSB said.
Five other residents near the blow-out suffered burns or smoke inhalation, and Reik received burns, according to the federal reports.
The fire destroyed five mobile homes and damaged 14 other houses. One lawsuit filed after the blast listed more than 80 people who suffered physical injuries or property damage
Reik, who is also a Lexington firefighter, said he was home asleep when he heard an alert over the police radio about the explosion. He lived 15 miles from the spot, but could see the flames “clear as day” when he went to his cruiser to head to the site, he said.
Reik said he heard a dispatch that an elderly man had called 911 and said there was fire around his house and that he was handicapped and couldn’t get out. He drove into the mobile home park to look for people.
The fire was so bright he was wearing sunglasses. It was so hot he could smell the plastic pieces in the cruiser heating up, and it was hard to hear transmissions on the radio because of the roar of the flames.
“It was like opening an oven door and just keeping your face standing there looking in the oven,” Reik told NTSB investigators. “And I knew — I was like, all right — I remember telling myself, I’ve went too far, I need to get out of here, you know, this is not a safe place, you know, I’m an idiot coming in this far.”
Reik said as he turned his car, he saw an older man with a cane lying on the porch of his house, and “just hammered on the throttle” to get to him.
Reik said he ran to the porch to get the man and wrestle him into the cruiser.
The man was screaming something as Reik tried to push his legs into the back seat of the car, but Reik couldn’t hear.
“And then he finally gets my attention and he’s screaming, and I finally figured, he was saying ‘My wife. My wife, my wife, my wife,’ ” Reik said.
Riek’s first thought was that there was no way the man’s wife was still alive.
“You know, there’s nobody living in that — the house is on fire. And he’s like ‘My wife.’ And he goes, ‘She’s inside.’ ”
Reik said he took three steps toward the mobile home, then started to turn back because of the baking heat. His eyes were uncomfortably dry and he couldn’t close them all the way.
“I remember stopping and looking back at the car, and I could see him . . . looking at me like, ‘You can’t leave her,’ you know,” Reik said.
He sprinted to the house and found the man’s wife just inside the front door. She was a small woman; he picked her up and ran to the cruiser, putting her in the back seat with her husband, Reik said.
As he drove out, he saw Derringer lying in the driveway of a home, Reik said.
He got out to try to pick her up, but she was too hot to touch, Reik told investigators.
As he drove out he passed deputies from the Boyle County Sheriff’s Office coming in. They retrieved Derringer’s body after getting some protective clothing, Reik said.
As Reik left the scene he met an ambulance on U.S. 127. He stopped it and helped transfer the couple to the ambulance to be taken to the hospital.
Both survived.
Reik said that after Texas Eastern shut off the gas firefighters put out the flames, he went back to help search.
The house where he found the older couple was gone, he said.
The pipe that failed is one of three parallel 30-inch gas lines at the site. The pipe that failed runs 775 miles from Pennsylvania to Mississippi, according to the federal report.
It is operated by Texas Eastern Transmission LLP, a subsidiary of Canadian energy company Enbridge.
The defects identified in the reports released this week were hard spots — areas in a pipe where the metal is considerably harder than the surrounding metal, the National Transportation Safety Board said in documents posted this week.
Those spots, which can happen during the manufacturing process or because of changes in the chemistry of the metal over time, can become failure points, according to the Pipeline Safety Trust.
The origin of the break in the pipe was near two hard spots identified in the pipe, according to a report from the NTSB Materials Laboratory.
Texas Eastern had the line inspected in 2011, but the contractor did not report any evidence of hard spots.
After the failure, however, NTSB investigators asked the contractor’s successor company to take another look at the readings from 2011, and the company found 10 hard-spot indications that had not been reported earlier, according to the NTSB report.
Testing also found corrosion pitting in the pipe, the NTSB said.
The finding is consistent with an earlier report from another federal agency.
The line that blew up in Lincoln County, No. 15, also failed in November 2003 near Morehead and in February 1986 in Garrard County, injuring three people, according to the NTSB report.
One of the parallel lines blew up in April 1985 in Metcalfe County, killing five people and injuring three others.
This story was originally published March 12, 2021 at 4:05 PM.
