Video: The disaster's impact still felt, 30 years later

PDF of The Charleston Gazette, the day after the disaster (7.4MB)

Click here for more Willow Island stories

WILLOW ISLAND - Angie Steele was 10 years old when the worst construction disaster in U.S. history wiped out 13 men in her family.

"I was in the fifth grade," the now 40-year-old Angie Colvin remembered. "And my mom shows up." Barbara Steele, a young mother with four kids, had already pulled Angie's two brothers and little sister out of their classrooms. "She was really calm ... She says, 'We need to pray' ...

"And we start praying that our dad's alive."

But they were all dead, all 51 men who were on the scaffold when it peeled away from the big concrete cooling tower at the Monongahela Power plant.

For a few days, the people of tiny Willow Island - and especially the "Men of Steele," as one reporter dubbed them - were the center of America's attention. But then the reporters left, and the power plant workers went back to work, and today most people have never heard of Willow Island.

Like the peel off an apple

"What do you think about working on the tower?" a young Steele cousin, Steve Blouir, asked veteran power plant worker James Renner 30 years ago.

"I don't like working on anything I have to rig off of," Renner replied firmly.

Renner remembers the conversation well. It was the last time he ever rode the freight elevator at the power plant with young Steve Blouir.

What Renner meant was this: The scaffold the company was using to build the tower was not anchored to the ground, like a normal scaffold. Instead, it was anchored to the half-finished tower, hundreds of feet in the air. The men would pour a layer of concrete, bolt the scaffold to it, and when that layer dried, it would hold their weight as they poured the next layer.

Except this time, it didn't.

"I thought a jet airplane had hit that stack," said Renner, who was on the ground at the time. "And we all ran."

Later, other witnesses would say the scaffold sounded like a train roaring by. Some people heard screams. Some said they heard none.

Some of the witnesses were wives, startled away from their morning housework in the trailer court across the street. They watched the scaffold that held their husbands spiral away from the gigantic tower like the peel off an apple.

The men tried to find a way off, witness Katie Robinson told reporters afterward.

"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 ..."

Renner and the other workers immediately plunged into the tangle of steel and concrete, digging for their neighbors and brothers.

They pulled out only bodies, some torn to pieces. Men who had seen grisly death in Vietnam and World War II turned away in horror.

"I carried five or six men out, but I just couldn't stand no more," worker Gene Johnson told the Parkersburg Sentinel that day. "One guy was busted wide open. His insides were spilling out. I just couldn't stand no more."

Renner helped pull out 27 men. "Every person's eyes was open that I helped get out," he remembered.

He kept looking until he found Steve Blouir.

"He was going to get married." Renner choked on the words and wiped at his tears. "I found him. It was a terrible thing. I knew every one of these people. I said, 'I'm done.'"

The Steele boys

The little Steele kids had been bundled off to their grandmother's house.

"They were showing the names [of the dead] on TV," Angie Colvin remembered. "And that's what I remember - watching that stupid TV. And watching the names going down through, you know how they scroll and scroll. And we didn't want to see it ...

"After that, I remember nothing."

Almost every man in Angie Steele's life was on that cooling tower. The big, black-haired Steele boys were known all over the community, and it was a close-knit clan: church together every Sunday and Wednesday, big Sunday dinners at Grandma's house every week. Angie's dad coached tee ball and later Little League, and the Steele boys still played softball with the buddies they'd known since birth.

And they all worked at the power plant.

"My grandpa was down there, looking for his sons," Colvin said. "His boys."

Video: The disaster's impact still felt, 30 years later

PDF of The Charleston Gazette, the day after the disaster (7.4MB)

Click here for more Willow Island stories

WILLOW ISLAND - Angie Steele was 10 years old when the worst construction disaster in U.S. history wiped out 13 men in her family.

"I was in the fifth grade," the now 40-year-old Angie Colvin remembered. "And my mom shows up." Barbara Steele, a young mother with four kids, had already pulled Angie's two brothers and little sister out of their classrooms. "She was really calm ... She says, 'We need to pray' ...

"And we start praying that our dad's alive."

But they were all dead, all 51 men who were on the scaffold when it peeled away from the big concrete cooling tower at the Monongahela Power plant.

For a few days, the people of tiny Willow Island - and especially the "Men of Steele," as one reporter dubbed them - were the center of America's attention. But then the reporters left, and the power plant workers went back to work, and today most people have never heard of Willow Island.

Like the peel off an apple

"What do you think about working on the tower?" a young Steele cousin, Steve Blouir, asked veteran power plant worker James Renner 30 years ago.

"I don't like working on anything I have to rig off of," Renner replied firmly.

Renner remembers the conversation well. It was the last time he ever rode the freight elevator at the power plant with young Steve Blouir.

What Renner meant was this: The scaffold the company was using to build the tower was not anchored to the ground, like a normal scaffold. Instead, it was anchored to the half-finished tower, hundreds of feet in the air. The men would pour a layer of concrete, bolt the scaffold to it, and when that layer dried, it would hold their weight as they poured the next layer.

Except this time, it didn't.

"I thought a jet airplane had hit that stack," said Renner, who was on the ground at the time. "And we all ran."

Later, other witnesses would say the scaffold sounded like a train roaring by. Some people heard screams. Some said they heard none.

Some of the witnesses were wives, startled away from their morning housework in the trailer court across the street. They watched the scaffold that held their husbands spiral away from the gigantic tower like the peel off an apple.

The men tried to find a way off, witness Katie Robinson told reporters afterward.

"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 ..."

Renner and the other workers immediately plunged into the tangle of steel and concrete, digging for their neighbors and brothers.

They pulled out only bodies, some torn to pieces. Men who had seen grisly death in Vietnam and World War II turned away in horror.

"I carried five or six men out, but I just couldn't stand no more," worker Gene Johnson told the Parkersburg Sentinel that day. "One guy was busted wide open. His insides were spilling out. I just couldn't stand no more."

Renner helped pull out 27 men. "Every person's eyes was open that I helped get out," he remembered.

He kept looking until he found Steve Blouir.

"He was going to get married." Renner choked on the words and wiped at his tears. "I found him. It was a terrible thing. I knew every one of these people. I said, 'I'm done.'"

The Steele boys

The little Steele kids had been bundled off to their grandmother's house.

"They were showing the names [of the dead] on TV," Angie Colvin remembered. "And that's what I remember - watching that stupid TV. And watching the names going down through, you know how they scroll and scroll. And we didn't want to see it ...

"After that, I remember nothing."

Almost every man in Angie Steele's life was on that cooling tower. The big, black-haired Steele boys were known all over the community, and it was a close-knit clan: church together every Sunday and Wednesday, big Sunday dinners at Grandma's house every week. Angie's dad coached tee ball and later Little League, and the Steele boys still played softball with the buddies they'd known since birth.

And they all worked at the power plant.

"My grandpa was down there, looking for his sons," Colvin said. "His boys."

Only one of Lee Steele's five sons, Bob, was not on the cooling tower that day. They laid the bodies of 26-year-old Miles, 29-year-old Ernest, 30-year-old Ronald and 32-year-old Larry Gale - Angie's dad - out in Angie's school gymnasium, along with their uncle Emmett, 61. It was the only place big enough to hold the hundreds of mourners.

"There was Emmett and the four boys laying there," Renner said. "I went over to Lee Steele, and he embraced me.

"I said, 'Mr. Steele, I don't have a thing to say.'"

Vultures

After a while, nobody talked about it.

For a few hours after the scaffold fell, workers readily told reporters what they suspected: The company's weeks-long campaign to rush the job had finally cost 51 men their lives.

"The scaffolding was attached to green concrete, dammit," veteran iron worker Tom Williams told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "They stripped the forms too quickly. They only gave the concrete 24 hours to cure and they should have given it at least 72 hours ...

"We had safety meetings every Monday night ... And we kept putting in recommendations and they kept ignoring them. We just knowed this was going to happen."

But things quickly turned ugly between the people of Pleasants County and the big-city journalists that descended from New York and Washington.

Some reporters hid in the woods and secretly filmed funerals. Others concentrated on their own notions of how "hillbillies" should act.

One profile of the "Men of Steele" that went out on the UPI wire - datelined "Cow Creek Valley, W.Va." - featured mourning women clutching plastic Jesuses. "The mountain people are suspicious of the lowlands," it informed readers. "They may go for the jobs, the Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco and the women's beehive hairdos. But not down there to live."

"The media came in here like vultures," Angie Colvin said. "Into people's homes, they jumped over cars ... It was scary. That's why people don't talk about it."

The disaster faded to a one-paragraph mention, even in the West Virginia history books that teach schoolchildren here in Pleasants County.

A new generation

Today, the finished cooling tower looms constantly over the Pleasants County landscape. Halfway up, you can still see a dark scar where the concrete failed that day.

For nearly a quarter-century, that scar served as the only monument to the 51.

Then, eight years ago, Angie Colvin's 12-year-old son Anthony Lauer told his mom he needed an idea for a social studies project.

"Why don't you do something on the history of the tower?" she suggested.

Colvin had always been curious about it - even though she had quickly learned, as a young girl Anthony's age, that the Willow Island disaster was something you just didn't discuss.

Her son quickly learned the same thing. Nobody would talk.

"I had no idea about anything that had happened. In our family, it was kind of a hush-hush thing. People were still pretty sensitive about the situation," Anthony Lauer said. "We really relied on newspapers."

The decades-old articles now bring the disaster to life for a generation of young people who never learned the story. One tells of a 25-year-old widow, who dreamed before the disaster that she had only one week left with her husband: "'He said it was only a dream,' she said as she left the morgue where his body lay." Another tells of a worker who tried to patch up the ripped bodies before their families had to see them.

Lauer, a sixth-grader at the time, raised $70,000 to build a monument to the victims of Willow Island.

Today, you can see it, if you drive along W.Va. 2 in the shadow of the plant - an hourglass-shaped concrete miniature of the hourglass-shaped, concrete cooling tower that still pours out steam overhead. You can trace the names on a big bronze plaque, and see the graves of the Steele boys in the distance. They're all buried beside the plant.

When Lauer was a freshman in high school, the memorial was finally done. On the anniversary of the disaster, he got the sophomores to read the names. Cars lined up into the distance, so many people came to hear them. His grandma sang, and his mom cried. And people started talking about the disaster again.

Anthony Lauer is 20 years old now. He married James Renner's granddaughter, Devin. They have a son of their own, 7-month-old Noah.

"[Devin] can't wait until we can bring Noah up here and show him everything," Lauer said.

"It'll be here forever."

To contact staff writer Tara Tuckwiller, use e-mail or call 348-5189.