Inside the Nippon Dynawave disaster: what we know, and what the enforcement record shows

At approximately 7:15 a.m. on Tuesday, May 26, 2026, a tank holding white liquor ruptured at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Company facility at 3401 Industrial Way in Longview, Washington. White liquor is a hot, highly corrosive alkaline solution — primarily sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide, with sodium carbonate — used in the kraft pulp process to break wood chips down into pulp. Contact with skin causes severe chemical burns.

The tank was built to hold roughly 900,000 gallons and was about 60 percent full at the time of the failure. Around the same moment, a water main on the site also ruptured; officials later estimated that several hundred thousand gallons of chemical and water combined, most of it remaining on the facility grounds. Authorities have used the words explosion, implosion, rupture, and failure more or less interchangeably, and have stressed that the cause is not yet known. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal investigative agency, has opened its own inquiry, and Washington’s Department of Labor & Industries will begin a formal investigation once recovery is complete.

The human toll has climbed through the week. As of the morning of May 29, officials had confirmed eight deaths — six bodies recovered Thursday, plus two workers who died at hospitals — with three more still unrecovered and presumed dead. Crews found the recovered workers near the employee breakroom; the tank failed during a shift change. Governor Bob Ferguson has said the state is bracing for what could be its deadliest workplace tragedy in 96 years, a toll expected to reach eleven. Seven employees and one firefighter were injured; some suffered burns, chemical exposure, or inhalation injuries, and several were transferred from the local PeaceHealth hospital to specialized care.

Families have begun to name those killed, though the Cowlitz County Coroner’s Office has said official identifications will follow recovery and notification. Among those identified by relatives is Gilbert Bernal, 52, an instrument technician and electrician who had worked at the mill for more than a decade; his daughter told Oregon Public Broadcasting that he had put himself through night classes while raising two children. Families have also named Dillon Miller, who leaves behind a partner and three children; Jared Ammons, whose family wrote that he left a wife, two children, and one on the way; John Forsberg, an electrician and father of two; and Clint Doran, Tyler Covington, and Brad Covington. Hundreds gathered for a candlelight vigil at R.A. Long Park the evening of the rupture, and the Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers union hall became the family assistance center in the hours afterward.

The environmental damage is significant. White liquor reached the facility’s storm drains and entered waterways feeding the Columbia River, causing pH spikes and killing fish in nearby sloughs. The EPA and the Washington Department of Ecology are jointly overseeing a flushing operation to move high-pH water away from residential areas and the city’s aquifer before diluting and discharging it. Officials say Longview’s drinking water remains safe and is being continuously monitored, and that early estimates of the volume left inside the damaged tank have been revised down from about 90,000 gallons to roughly 25,000.

The mill, which has operated in Longview since 1953, was a Weyerhaeuser facility for decades. Weyerhaeuser sold the Longview pulp-and-paper operation, including the liquid packaging board business, to Japan-based Nippon Paper Industries in 2016 for $285 million in cash. It now runs as Nippon Dynawave Packaging, a subsidiary of Nippon Paper Group, and employs roughly 1,000 people across the pulp and paper mill and the liquid packaging plant.

Not the first incident at this facility

Tuesday’s rupture was not the plant’s first emergency in recent years. In July 2023, a large wood chip pile caught fire at the facility, sending smoke as far as Portland and triggering a regional air quality advisory; the cause was never publicly determined. In August 2025, a two-alarm fire destroyed a locomotive repair warehouse operated by Patriot Rail on Nippon Dynawave property, with no reported injuries.

In 2025, Washington’s Department of Labor & Industries cited the company after a worker suffered a finger amputation — not for causing the injury, but for moving the equipment involved before state investigators could examine it, which the agency noted can compromise its ability to determine what happened. That citation was classified as general and carried no penalty. At the time of the May 26 rupture, L&I had two unrelated investigations open at the facility: one begun in March after an anonymous complaint about a valve on a tank holding aqua ammonia, another corrosive chemical, and a second begun in May after a complaint about a sinkhole caused by a failed drain. L&I has said neither open investigation is connected to the tank that ruptured.

What the enforcement record shows — and what it doesn’t

Judged by its workplace-safety record alone, Nippon Dynawave looks unremarkable. According to figures reported by the Associated Press from L&I’s database, the company had been fined a total of roughly $3,400 for three health-and-safety violations since the start of 2021 — the largest a $2,700 penalty tied to respiratory-protection requirements during the pandemic, and a $700 serious citation. That is a trivial sum for an industrial operator employing a thousand people, and a search limited to safety records would have returned a quiet plant.

The environmental record tells a very different story, and it lived in entirely separate databases. The Seattle Times reported that over five years the facility was the subject of at least 19 Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act violations, with the EPA escalating to formal citations five times and the mill paying a fraction of the resulting fines. KGW, reviewing EPA’s compliance database, found the plant out of compliance with the Clean Water Act in every quarter for the past three years — including eight quarters of significant violations — and out of Clean Air Act compliance in four of the prior twelve quarters. Reporting indicated the facility’s discharged effluent spiked to roughly 770 percent of its permitted limit last August. On the state side, KGW found Washington regulators had taken formal environmental enforcement action against the mill 18 times over the past decade, with fines totaling about $43,700, including separate $9,000 penalties for a 2017 sulfur dioxide exceedance and a 2018 methanol release.

None of this proves the disaster was foreseeable. Investigators have not determined what caused the tank to fail, and the open L&I inspections — including the complaint about a valve on a separate corrosive-chemical tank — are not, according to the state, connected to the white liquor tank that ruptured. It would be wrong to draw a straight line from a wastewater exceedance to a structural failure.

But the gap between the two records is the point. The safety-only view of this employer — the one captured in the $3,400 figure now circulating in headlines — was the most reassuring and the least complete. The fuller picture of a facility under sustained regulatory strain only emerges when the workplace, environmental, and state records are read together. An employer’s risk profile rarely sits in a single agency’s files, and a plant that looks clean through one lens can look chronically troubled through several. In Longview, the workers who filed those anonymous complaints appear to have understood that long before the rest of us were looking.

Sources: KGW, KING 5, KIRO 7, OPB, KUOW, KNKX, The Seattle Times, the Associated Press, Packaging Dive, the Washington Department of Ecology, and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board. Death toll and victim identifications were accurate as of the morning of May 29, 2026, and were continuing to change.