A forklift operator who was working the afternoon shift at Babine Forest Products sawmill near Burns Lake when the building exploded in a ball of flame Friday night says the disaster that injured 19 and left two men missing and presumed dead could have been prevented.
Blaine Bertacco is angry mill operators did not find the source of a gas leak reported to management earlier Friday by day shift workers.
"This could have been prevented," said Bertacco.
"My foreman never informed me of it, but I guess there were a lot of reports from workers on day shift that there was a smell of gas. From what I understand, nothing was done about it because it wasn't brought to my attention by any of the supervisors and the afternoon shift was commenced."
Bertacco was on his lunch break at about 8:10 p.m. when the explosion rocked the entire mill.
"I took one bit of my sandwich and boom, it the loudest boom I've ever heard in my life," said the 30-year-old Bertacco. "It shook the whole kiln lunchroom and moved us. We were about 200 feet away from [the kiln] and we all thought the other forklift operator had hit us. The lights went out and everything went orange."
Bertacco walked back into the mill and looked over his shoulder and saw a huge fireball coming toward him. He grabbed a flashlight from his locker and tried to walk around a load of wood, but his path was blocked by fire.
"The whole building was engulfed in flames," Bertacco said. "The explosion had to have gone through the entire mill. I could see pieces of it caving in and collapsing."
He got on the radio and ordered an alarm to evacuate the building and drove in his forklift to the parking lot muster area for a head count. Some workers were forced to jump from the second floor because the main floor entrances were blocked by the flames.
"When I got out of the forklift I was pretty angry, I wanted to get mad at a foreman and my buddy, Adrian Smith, bear-hugged me and told me, 'You need to be strong, Blaine, there's a lot of people who can't take this.'
"I turned on my truck and it was just like the movies when you see a big explosion and a bunch of hurt people coming out of it smouldering, with smoke coming off of them. It was pretty ugly. I saw a lot I didn't want to see."
Bertacco helped three of the burn victims -- Kevin Sanpare, Ryan Clay, and Larry Tress -- into his truck and drove them to Lakes District Hospital, about 15 minutes away.
"The guys were pretty shook up, terrified of what had just happened, and I got the numbers of their mom and wives and called to tell them know what happened," Bertacco said. "Some guys had half their clothes burnt off, they looked pretty bad.
"I must have passed 100 vehicles on the way into town."
At the entrance to the hospital, Bertacco met up with his father John and two co-workers who have first aid skills. They saw how overwhelmed hospital staff were, already dealing with other victims of the fire. The nurse on duty handed out scissors and asked them to help her cut the clothes off the three men to treat them faster and reduce the risk of contaminating the hospital for the other burn victims being brought in.
"Their hands were all burnt, their cheeks, their faces, their foreheads, their hair and shoulders were burnt," said John Bertacco. "It was full in there, it was quite the impact. Every one of them was in shock. We tried to keep them talking.
"The ambulance came and this one person, a friend of mine since we were 16 or 17, Kenny Michell, I barely recognized him. His face was all burnt and his hair was singed."
The burn victims were then transported to Prince George and flown to Vancouver or Edmonton for treatment.
The cold snap over the past week dropped temperatures at the mill as low as minus-48 C, so cold on Thursday that Blaine Bertacco said it resulted in hydraulic lines disconnecting on the forklifts. Workers wanted the mill shut down temporarily until the weather warmed up, but that did not happen.
The same mill was shut down in March for two weeks after an electrical fire. It is jointly-owned by Hampton Affiliates of Portland, Ore., and the Burns Lake Native Development Corporation.
"We're all family at that mill, we all know each other some way or another," said Blaine Bertacco, who has worked at the mill 5 1/2 years. "This is pretty disastrous to our small community, it's the lifeline of the town and now we've lost the whole economy of the town. It's devastating."
