No Explosion, Lots Of Fallout Hayden Unnerved By Near-Catastrophe At Nearby Rimrock Explosives Plant

Cora Marks’ heart was still racing as she lay awake in her bed - only a half-mile from a building expected to explode only hours earlier.

“My adrenaline was still going when I went to bed last night,” she said Thursday, the day after finding out a fire had broken out at the nearby Rimrock Explosives plant.

She was among hundreds who fled their Hayden homes Wednesday after the fire started in the plant on Government Way.

Residents were told the potential blast could be 75 times the size of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Authorities warned that an explosion was imminent - a blast that could level Marks’ home and everything else within half a mile. But the looming disaster never came.

Still, the threat left a scar on Hayden’s collective psyche.

Some residents spent the night tossing and turning, others cringing at the sound of police sirens. Still others brushed off the incident as unlikely to ever happen again.

Many residents were shocked to find out their homes were so close to an explosives plant.

The fire started when a wooden plank rubbed up against a pulley wheel. The flames burned only a few feet of the board before fizzling out.

The incident left Thelma Suess shaken even after returning to her home on Wednesday. She lives only a quarter of a mile from the plant.

“Every time I’d hear a siren I thought ‘Oh no, here we go again,”’ she said Thursday morning.

Suess said she never had concerns about the plant before Wednesday.

But now, “I just have mixed emotions about living so close to it. Do I want to stay here or do I move on? Those are the thing that go through my mind.”

Clyde Marks, Cora Marks’ brother-in-law, has lived on his Lancaster Road property since the 1940s. In the 1950s, the explosives company - then under a different name - moved in about a quarter of a mile away.

He was surprised to find out that the Rimrock Explosives building that caught fire held 275,000 pounds of materials used to create explosives.

“I have never worried about it at all, but I never realized they had that kind of storage,” Marks said Thursday.

“My feeling now is that they need to get that thing out of here,” he said from his front yard. “If it happened once, it could happen again, and we might not be so lucky.”

Donna and Dan Bligh wanted a spacious chunk of rural property - room for their children to grow. So in February they bought a place at the corner of Kelly Rae Drive and Government Way in Hayden.

“I had no idea there was an explosives plant there when I bought this place,” Donna Bligh said. Rimrock Explosives is about a half-mile from her home.

“That’s too close for me, especially with five kids,” she said, cradling her daughter in her arms. “The thought of my kids playing out in the back yard and having something like this happen is scary.”

Bligh is also concerned the recent incident and the proximity of the explosives company will hurt the resale value of her home.

Bill Saunders, who lives about a half a mile from the company, said he probably wouldn’t have bought his home had he known the plant was so close. “I wouldn’t have looked at it twice.”

After returning home Wednesday, Bruce McGovern and his family spent the evening developing a plan in case of a future emergency. The family will meet in the Shopko parking lot if they are evacuated again.

But he said he isn’t worried about living next to Rimrock. As a former mining company employee he has toured the business and feels it is a safe operation.

“I’m not going to live my life being afraid of everything that can happen,” he said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo