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But on that Thursday morning, 30 years ago today, something went terribly wrong.

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Bent rebar flows over the top of the tower where the scaffolding collapsed.

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Concrete began to unwrap off the top of the tower. First it peeled counter-clockwise, and then in both directions. A mess of concrete, wooden forms and metal scaffolding crumbled to the ground.

Fifty-one construction workers were on the scaffold at the time. They all plunged to their deaths.

"I looked up at the top of the tower, and it was gone - the scaffolding was gone," William Van Vlack Jr., who was working on the ground at the time, later told investigators.

Thirty years later, the Willow Island disaster is still considered the worst construction accident in U.S. history.

Like most disasters, it's still hard to point to one specific triggering event. Instead, a mix of safety lapses combined to bring the tower crashing down.

Concrete in the previous day's lift hadn't hardened enough to hold the scaffolding. Key bolts meant to attach the scaffolding to the tower were missing. An elaborate concrete hoisting system was modified without proper engineering review. Contractors were rushing to speed construction, perhaps overlooking important safety measures along the way.

"There were redundant features here that, if they had corrected them, this wouldn't have happened," said Stan Elliott, who was then and is now the area director for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

"If they had put the bolts in, it probably wouldn't have happened," Elliott said earlier this month. "If they had let the concrete cure, it probably wouldn't have happened.

"But when you put all of these things together all on the same day at the same time, this is what happened."

'A matter of luck'

Up and down the Ohio Valley in the 1970s, power plants were rising up. Coal was taking over as a major source of electricity across the country. New coal-fired units were being built from Mason County to Moundsville.

Located just south of St. Marys, the Willow Island plant was being built by Allegheny Power System, now called Allegheny Energy, for its Monongahela Power unit. There were already two smaller units at the site, built in 1949 and 1959. The new, $677 million plant would include two units and a total of 1,300-megawatts of capacity.

By April 1978, workers had finished one and were building a second "natural draft" cooling tower. These are like huge chimneys, which create an updraft of air that cools the water as it falls down the inside of the tower.

For most people, these hourglass-shaped concrete cooling towers probably bring back bad memories of the March 1979 Three-Mile Island nuclear plant accident.

But cooling towers are crucial parts of coal-fired power stations as well.

In power plants, electricity is generated when steam drives a turbine. This steam must be condensed before it can be returned to the boiler to continue the cycle of steam and electricity generation.

This condensation happens in a heat exchanger. Cooling water is needed in the heat exchanger and it is this cooling water that is cycled through the cooling tower. In this way, the water from the boilers and steam turbines are kept separate from the cooling water. Impurities are kept out of the turbines.

One of Willow Island's contractors, New Jersey-based Research-Cottrell, had already built 35 cooling towers at plants around the country.

Research-Cottrell used a patented system, with an elaborate, four-level system of scaffolding that circled the tower as it was built. The scaffolding was secured to the inside and outside of the tower. Hydraulic jacks lifted the scaffold as work on the tower progressed.

A system of cranes spread around the top of the scaffolding hoisted buckets of concrete up. Workers were to pour one 5-foot lift per day.

After the disaster, a Research-Cottrell lawyer told a congressional committee that the system previously had a flawless record.

"There has been no death and there has been no serious injury related to this complex system of construction," company lawyer Willis O. Shay said.

But Van Vlack, a plant electrician, later told a state panel that he worried about the system from the start.

"I consider that an extremely dangerous procedure - the fact that they have managed to build many, many cooling towers with that particular procedure before - I would consider more a matter of luck than anything else," Van Vlack said.

Wet concrete and wrong angles

After the collapse, OSHA called in the National Engineering Laboratory, part of the Commerce Department, to help figure out what happened. Engineers studied the scaffolding setup, examined concrete curing times, and calculated the loads created by lifting the buckets up the tower.

In a 188-page report, they concluded that "the most probable cause" of the collapse was "the imposition of construction loads ... before the concrete of Lift 28 had gained adequate strength to support these loads."

Translation? The concrete wasn't given time to dry.

But OSHA's Elliott recalls that the causes were more complicated than that.

For one thing, the entire scaffolding and crane system was based on elaborate geometry. Each crane had to be located at a certain spot at the top of the tower, and each bucket loaded and hoisted from another certain spot on the ground. If everything was placed just right, the angles lined up to give the system enough strength. If the angles were off, the strength just wasn't there.

Elliott said OSHA discovered that, to cut corners on construction time, management and workers were loading concrete from different spots. The angles were wrong, weakening the entire system.

"The concept was wonderful, but the implementation left something to be desired," Elliott said.

On June 8, 1978, OSHA cited Willow Island contractors for 10 willful and 10 serious violations. Among other things, the violations cited the failure to field test concrete and properly anchor the scaffold system.

OSHA proposed $108,300 in fines. The cases settled for $85,500, or about $1,700 per worker killed in the disaster.

Joe Powell, then-president of the West Virginia AFL-CIO, called the amount "a small pittance of a fine."

"Judged as a percentage against profits, such fines would not constitute a tenth of a percent and most assuredly would not serve as a deterrent to future accidents," Powell told a congressional hearing convened in St. Marys.

OSHA referred the case to the U.S. Department of Justice for a criminal investigation. A grand jury was convened, but no charges were ever filed.

Meanwhile, Willow Island's general contractor, United Engineers and Constructors Inc., hired a consultant to perform its own study.

The consultant, Lev Zetlin Associates, said that OSHA and the Bureau of Standards were wrong to blame improperly cured concrete.

"Key evidence," the consultant said, "suggested that the problems originated due to lack of understanding of the scaffold system by the workers, and also due to its systematic misuse. Lack of technical and management supervision was also an underlying cause to this collapse."

 Read next article in the series

Watch an audio slideshow with historic photos

See reports of the investigations into the Willow Island Disaster

 Click here for more Willow Island stories

But on that Thursday morning, 30 years ago today, something went terribly wrong.

The cable hoisting that bucket of concrete went slack. The crane that was pulling it up fell toward the inside of the tower. Scaffolding followed. The previous day's concrete, Lift 28, started to collapse.

Concrete began to unwrap off the top of the tower. First it peeled counter-clockwise, and then in both directions. A mess of concrete, wooden forms and metal scaffolding crumbled to the ground.

Fifty-one construction workers were on the scaffold at the time. They all plunged to their deaths.

"I looked up at the top of the tower, and it was gone - the scaffolding was gone," William Van Vlack Jr., who was working on the ground at the time, later told investigators.

Thirty years later, the Willow Island disaster is still considered the worst construction accident in U.S. history.

Like most disasters, it's still hard to point to one specific triggering event. Instead, a mix of safety lapses combined to bring the tower crashing down.

Concrete in the previous day's lift hadn't hardened enough to hold the scaffolding. Key bolts meant to attach the scaffolding to the tower were missing. An elaborate concrete hoisting system was modified without proper engineering review. Contractors were rushing to speed construction, perhaps overlooking important safety measures along the way.

"There were redundant features here that, if they had corrected them, this wouldn't have happened," said Stan Elliott, who was then and is now the area director for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

"If they had put the bolts in, it probably wouldn't have happened," Elliott said earlier this month. "If they had let the concrete cure, it probably wouldn't have happened.

"But when you put all of these things together all on the same day at the same time, this is what happened."

'A matter of luck'

Up and down the Ohio Valley in the 1970s, power plants were rising up. Coal was taking over as a major source of electricity across the country. New coal-fired units were being built from Mason County to Moundsville.

Located just south of St. Marys, the Willow Island plant was being built by Allegheny Power System, now called Allegheny Energy, for its Monongahela Power unit. There were already two smaller units at the site, built in 1949 and 1959. The new, $677 million plant would include two units and a total of 1,300-megawatts of capacity.

By April 1978, workers had finished one and were building a second "natural draft" cooling tower. These are like huge chimneys, which create an updraft of air that cools the water as it falls down the inside of the tower.

For most people, these hourglass-shaped concrete cooling towers probably bring back bad memories of the March 1979 Three-Mile Island nuclear plant accident.

But cooling towers are crucial parts of coal-fired power stations as well.

In power plants, electricity is generated when steam drives a turbine. This steam must be condensed before it can be returned to the boiler to continue the cycle of steam and electricity generation.

This condensation happens in a heat exchanger. Cooling water is needed in the heat exchanger and it is this cooling water that is cycled through the cooling tower. In this way, the water from the boilers and steam turbines are kept separate from the cooling water. Impurities are kept out of the turbines.

One of Willow Island's contractors, New Jersey-based Research-Cottrell, had already built 35 cooling towers at plants around the country.

Research-Cottrell used a patented system, with an elaborate, four-level system of scaffolding that circled the tower as it was built. The scaffolding was secured to the inside and outside of the tower. Hydraulic jacks lifted the scaffold as work on the tower progressed.

A system of cranes spread around the top of the scaffolding hoisted buckets of concrete up. Workers were to pour one 5-foot lift per day.

After the disaster, a Research-Cottrell lawyer told a congressional committee that the system previously had a flawless record.

"There has been no death and there has been no serious injury related to this complex system of construction," company lawyer Willis O. Shay said.

But Van Vlack, a plant electrician, later told a state panel that he worried about the system from the start.

"I consider that an extremely dangerous procedure - the fact that they have managed to build many, many cooling towers with that particular procedure before - I would consider more a matter of luck than anything else," Van Vlack said.

Wet concrete and wrong angles

After the collapse, OSHA called in the National Engineering Laboratory, part of the Commerce Department, to help figure out what happened. Engineers studied the scaffolding setup, examined concrete curing times, and calculated the loads created by lifting the buckets up the tower.

In a 188-page report, they concluded that "the most probable cause" of the collapse was "the imposition of construction loads ... before the concrete of Lift 28 had gained adequate strength to support these loads."

Translation? The concrete wasn't given time to dry.

But OSHA's Elliott recalls that the causes were more complicated than that.

For one thing, the entire scaffolding and crane system was based on elaborate geometry. Each crane had to be located at a certain spot at the top of the tower, and each bucket loaded and hoisted from another certain spot on the ground. If everything was placed just right, the angles lined up to give the system enough strength. If the angles were off, the strength just wasn't there.

Elliott said OSHA discovered that, to cut corners on construction time, management and workers were loading concrete from different spots. The angles were wrong, weakening the entire system.

"The concept was wonderful, but the implementation left something to be desired," Elliott said.

On June 8, 1978, OSHA cited Willow Island contractors for 10 willful and 10 serious violations. Among other things, the violations cited the failure to field test concrete and properly anchor the scaffold system.

OSHA proposed $108,300 in fines. The cases settled for $85,500, or about $1,700 per worker killed in the disaster.

Joe Powell, then-president of the West Virginia AFL-CIO, called the amount "a small pittance of a fine."

"Judged as a percentage against profits, such fines would not constitute a tenth of a percent and most assuredly would not serve as a deterrent to future accidents," Powell told a congressional hearing convened in St. Marys.

OSHA referred the case to the U.S. Department of Justice for a criminal investigation. A grand jury was convened, but no charges were ever filed.

Meanwhile, Willow Island's general contractor, United Engineers and Constructors Inc., hired a consultant to perform its own study.

The consultant, Lev Zetlin Associates, said that OSHA and the Bureau of Standards were wrong to blame improperly cured concrete.

"Key evidence," the consultant said, "suggested that the problems originated due to lack of understanding of the scaffold system by the workers, and also due to its systematic misuse. Lack of technical and management supervision was also an underlying cause to this collapse."

'Disastrous consequences'

Within days of the collapse, a young lawyer working for one of Ralph Nader's crusading groups was poring over OSHA records about Willow Island.

Robert B. Stulberg of Public Citizen's Health Research Group found what he called "substantial evidence" that OSHA knew nearly a year before the disaster that the scaffold used at Willow Island "posed serious hazards to workers."

In March 1977, an OSHA inspector who visited the site found no evidence that the same scaffolding - then being used to finish the first cooling tower - would hold the intended load. The inspector also warned that the company's use of only one temporary stair-tower could be hazardous if workers needed an emergency exit from the scaffolding.

A second inspection that same month found the scaffolding "was badly in need of repairs." Some of these repairs, it cautioned, "were made without knowledge of the engineering department." The inspector warned of possible "disastrous consequences."

Eula Bingham, assistant labor secretary for OSHA, responded that the Nader report was "untrue and actually misleading and has caused unnecessary anguish for members of this community by diverting attention from the true cause of the collapse."

Lawmakers greeted the Nader report with equal disdain. They grilled Stulberg in a hearing about his qualifications to perform such a study.

Then-Rep. Robert Mollohan, a Democrat whose district included Willow Island, told reporters that Stulberg's hearing testimony was "patently ridiculous."

"Any flannel-mouth can get up here and make a charge," Mollohan said.

'Last bastion of hope'

Not long after the collapse, then-state Labor Commissioner Steve Cook flew up the highway with a State Police trooper, headed for Willow Island. He needed to meet then-Gov. Jay Rockefeller to tour the site.

"I remember the trip, because we were going 115 miles per hour," Cook recalled.

But it would be six months before the state took any steps to investigate the disaster. Rockefeller was under pressure to do so. His Republican rival, Arch Moore, was giving speeches about Willow Island. So was A. James Manchin.

In early October 1978, Rockefeller announced the creation of the Governor's Commission on Willow Island. The group included labor and business representatives, and state lawmakers.

R.W. Bowser, who lost a son at Willow Island and was head of a victims' support group, called Rockefeller's commission "perhaps the last bastion of hope for truth and justice - even-handed justice - to prevail at the disaster site."

Rockefeller instructed the commission to "conduct a comprehensive and detailed investigation into the collapse, evaluate the facts and circumstances surrounding the collapse and determine, if possible, the cause or causes."

But much of the commission's 49-page report, released in December 1980, is spent criticizing OSHA. Commission members were furious that OSHA officials would not answer their questions, citing the federal criminal probe. They were especially upset that OSHA would not inspect all other cooling tower projects, and assure the public no repeats of Willow Island would ever happen.

"What they appear to be saying is, 'Don't bother us until someone is killed or injured,'" Cook said of OSHA during an April 1979 press conference in Wheeling.

The commission report did discuss one option for West Virginia officials unhappy with OSHA's performance: Create their own state workplace safety program. State inspectors would enforce federal safety standards, just as they currently do strip mining rules or water quality protections.

Commissioners declined to specifically recommend that course, though. Instead, they cautioned, "There are a great many considerations which should be given careful thought and research before any action is taken."

In the 27 years since, there has been little, if any, talk of West Virginia forming its own workplace safety agency.

After the Sago Mine disaster in January 2006, Gov. Joe Manchin said he wanted to make all West Virginia workers, not just coal miners, the safest in the nation.

"While we have certainly focused on improving mine safety, this year has also taught me that we can't, and shouldn't, take the safety of any of our West Virginia workplaces for granted," Manchin said during his 2007 State of the State address.

Manchin has not announced any specific steps to improve workplace safety for industries other than coal. And West Virginia remains one of 26 states without a public employee OSHA program.

Warnings ignored

On March 2, 1973 - more than five years before Willow Island - the roof literally fell in at the Skyline Plaza, a 26-story apartment complex under construction in Fairfax County, Va.

Fourteen workers were killed and 34 others injured. Agency inspectors cited the Skyline Plaza contractors for premature removal of forms and shoring beneath the building's top floor, and dismantling these supports without first testing and inspecting the concrete.

Neither Willow Island nor Skyline Plaza were the first - nor the last - concrete and masonry construction deaths.

"Many workers have been injured or killed in wall collapses," OSHA said later. "[But] these accidents had not received the publicity or public attention that the structure collapse received, probably because workers are killed one at a time rather than in large numbers at one time."

OSHA did not begin to toughen its rules for concrete and masonry construction until after Willow Island.

Today, loads cannot be placed on partially constructed structures unless someone trained in structural design has certified them as able to handle those loads. New rules also mandated on-site inspections of forms and shoring to ensure they matched blueprints. Concrete must be tested before forms and shoring are removed.

"It's more specific and it's also more rigorous," said Noah Connell, acting director of OSHA's directorate of construction.

But the rule changes were not proposed until September 1985, 7 1/2 years after Willow Island. And before OSHA finalized them, 28 more workers died in the collapse of the L'Ambiance Plaza, a 16-story apartment complex in Bridgeport, Conn. That disaster occurred on April 23, 1987, four days short of the 10-year anniversary of Willow Island.

Not for three more years, until June 1988, did OSHA finalize its improved rules on concrete and masonry construction.

And reforms in the agency's scaffolding rules, also prompted by Willow Island, were not finalized until 1990.

Lily Whiteman, a one-time Labor Department official, has criticized OSHA for taking too long to approve reforms in its construction safety standards.

"If the concrete masonry rule had swiftly followed Skyline Plaza, Willow Island might have been prevented," Whiteman wrote in a 1995 law review article.

In a report last week on workplace safety, the national AFL-CIO faulted the Bush administration for halting work on many new safety standards and delaying progress on others. Such reforms "have ground to a halt," the labor organization said.

Elliott, the Charleston area OSHA director, said it's always been hard for regulators to keep up with changing industry practices. He cited the ongoing flurry of construction activity to install huge new pollution controls at West Virginia power plants, and a string of accidents during those projects.

In March 2006, for example, construction worker Gerald W. Talbert died in a fire during construction of a new scrubber smokestack at American Electric Power's Mitchell Plant in Moundsville.

Contractors were using a fiber material that is fabricated on-site to line the stack, instead of pre-fabricated steel. Elliott said OSHA believes a spark from the work ignited pieces of the fiber, causing the fire.

"There's very little regulation of this procedure, and by the time we get a regulation, they will be done," Elliott said. "We're always playing catch-up. Technology moves so quickly that the regulations just can't keep up."

To contact staff writer Ken Ward Jr., use e-mail or call 348-1702.