Rescue Efforts Defended in Plant Fire

Officer Nick W. Borys of the Georgetown, Colo., Police Department stops a motorist headed up Guanella Pass where five maintenance workers are trapped in a pipe at an Xcel Energy hydroelectric power plant after a fire started in the facility near the small mountain community of Georgetown, Colo., on Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2007. Rescue workers are toiling to reach the workers as night falls on the mountains. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski) (David Zalubowski - AP)

GEORGETOWN, Colo. -- When fire broke out deep underground at a hydroelectric plant in the Rockies, officials at the surface dropped a radio down to five trapped men in a tunnel and were relieved to learn they were OK.

But by the time emergency crews reached them six hours later, they were dead.

On Wednesday, a day after the tragedy more than 1,500 feet underground at Xcel Corp.'s Cabin Creek power plant, investigators struggled to figure out what went wrong. Crews began to remove the workers' bodies.

The workers were identified as Donald Dejaynes, 43; Dupree Holt, 37; James St. Peters, 52; Gary Foster, 48; Anthony Aguirre, 18; all of California. Their hometowns weren't immediately available.

The men, whose bodies were found scattered along a 200 foot length of the 12-foot-wide pipe, didn't have any burn marks, indicating that they probably died from the smoke and fumes from the chemical fire, Clear Creek undersheriff Stu Nay said.

Authorities defended their rescue efforts, saying smoke, the complexities of the 4,000-foot tunnel's design and uncertainties about the dangers prevented them from going in after the men for more than 3 1/2 hours after the blaze broke out.

"We didn't know what was causing the fire, what was feeding the fire," Nay said. "You never know, when you're dealing with airflow and the intensity of the fire where we're facing a backdraft situation, what we're running into."

He added: "It's dangerous work. We can't afford to have someone else go in and complicate the problem."

The blaze erupted when a machine used by the workers to coat the tunnel with a mixture of paint and epoxy caught fire, Xcel Energy spokeswoman Ethnie Groves said.

Nay said the mixture is kept in a hopper to warm it up so will flow throw a sprayer. He said they were having problems spraying it so they added a solvent to the hopper and the hopper's heating element inadvertently turned on, igniting the vapors.

Nine employees of RPI Coating of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., had been sealing the inside of the pipe to prevent corrosion, a routine procedure that followed an annual inspection. Two others were working outside the pipe and one of them was injured when he ran back into the tunnel to help when the fire broke out.

The tunnel delivers water from a reservoir to turbines that generate electricity at the plant 30 miles west of Denver.