Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government By Jake Dima
A total of seven people were injured after an explosion rocked a Colorado steel mill on Saturday.
Firefighters arrived at the scene at approximately 6 p.m. and later discovered that a “cooling system failure” in a furnace led to the incident, Assistant Chief Keith Miller of the Pueblo Fire Department told KKTV. Authorities searched for victims, and the wounded were able to walk out on their own.
“We found that it was a furnace that they used to melt the steel that exploded,” Miller said. “When we first got here, they had 130 tons of steel inside that furnace at max temperature. It sounds like they had a cooling system failure, which is when water was introduced, which is potentially what caused the explosion. So we are waiting for that 130 tons of steel to cool down enough to where we can go in and operate.”
All of the injured parties were brought to local hospitals, according to Local 2102, a steelworkers union. Five were treated and subsequently released, two remain in intensive care units, and another was transported to a burn unit in Denver as of noon Sunday.
A firefighters union posted a series of photographs of the facility, one of which showed plumes of smoke.
Miller said the blast was not “minor.”
“The explosion itself was pretty powerful, definitely. I wouldn’t call it a minor explosion,” Miller said.
