Tower of Death

The toll: 51 workers

To the Shawnee Indians, the jagged mountains of West Virginia were "a dark and bloody ground," a realm of ferocious evil spirits best avoided. But there was no hint of danger on a sunny morning last week when 51 steelworkers, carpenters and laborers clambered 168 ft. up scaffolding inside a cooling tower at the Pleasants Power Station near St. Marys, W. Va., a hamlet of 2,348 nestled between verdant hills and the Ohio River. When completed, the 450-ft. tower will cool water used by the generating plant before returning it to the river.

Suddenly, a rumbling, thunderous crash rolled across the construction site, accompanied by screams. "The first thing I heard was concrete falling," said John Peppier, 38, a laborer who was working at the base of the tower. "I looked over my left shoulder and I could see the scaffolding falling. Then I could see people falling. Then, everything falling."

Like a giant slice of orange rind, the scaffolding pulled away from the cement that had been laid the previous day, and hurtled to the ground. Said Katie Robinson, a worker's wife: "When the scaffold began to fall from one end, 12 or 15 men were trying to find a way off, and they walked back one way and then they turned around, and I thought they were going to try to jump. But then it all came down and the safety net wrapped around the men. I could see them all bundled up inside, and they fell."

Stretcher-bearers and emergency workers were confronted with tons of debris -steel, concrete and boards -piled 6 to 10 ft. high on the floor of the tower. "There was so much stuff on the ground you couldn't see the bodies," said Construction Worker Bill Hess. Rescuers worked frantically for six hours to pull apart the debris, but found no survivors.

Most of the dead workers had come from nearby West Virginia farms, and their families gathered that afternoon at a local firehouse, a drab concrete building that was serving as a makeshift morgue. One worker at the tower, Robert Steele, 35, lost ten members of his family -four brothers, three uncles and three cousins. Friends and relatives consoled each other as Red Cross workers called out the victims' names. A young pregnant woman, waiting to identify her husband's body, sobbed on her mother's shoulder. At dusk, small groups of workers and relatives gathered solemnly outside the chain-link fence surrounding the piles of rubble at the tower's base. Near the tangled mass of steel stood a faded sign: MAKE SAFETY A BELL-RINGER THIS YEAR. qed

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