creek turning pink; human stakes established; question of public park becoming a fireball site

Emergencies and World Disasters · Jul 25, 2026 · 23m

creek turning pink; human stakes established; question of public park becoming a fireball site

When the creek turned pink at 3:25 p.m., gasoline was already flowing beneath a public park that had been hiding a damaged pipeline for five years - and in the next 97 minutes three safety systems would fail. How did a construction strike in 1994, a misconfigured relief valve, and an automatic valve closure combine to turn a summer afternoon into a catastrophe that killed three people?

In this episode, we tell what happened in Whatcom Falls Park on June 10, 1999, tracing the sequence from a buried…