To the rescue

Madison’s specialty team was put to the test at Didion Milling explosion

by

Collin Vander Galien had been working at Didion Milling in Cambria for about three months, loading 55-pound bags of processed corn into train cars. It was hardly his dream job but it paid well and he needed the money to pay off his truck and student loans from an unfinished degree from Madison College.

For the past month, he’d been working the night shift. Most days, he’d wake up in the afternoon, eat some leftovers, watch TV or play video games and then get ready for work. On May 31, he arrived at the plant just before 6 p.m. for his 12-hour shift and settled into his routine. “I came in and started cleaning until it was time to start throwing bags.”

Around 11 p.m., Vander Galien returned from a break. Moments later, he heard a loud boom. “I ducked my head and the next thing I knew, I was on my knees with my legs behind me.”

An explosion in the mill had tossed the train car he was in up in the air and onto its side. The concrete walls from the mill crumbled on top of the car. “There was debris all around me, there were pallets everywhere and it was super dark,” he says. “I was straight up on my knees and the train had fallen on my legs.”

Vander Galien, who was then 22, was in excruciating pain and pinned to the ground. “I was trapped and couldn’t move,” he says. “I just sat there screaming for help.”

At the time of the explosion, Rick Mulhern was asleep in his bunk at Madison Fire Department’s Station 8 on the far east side. It had been a busy day for the lieutenant, who helped a person suffering from seizures and assisted a woman giving birth to a girl at Truax Apartments.

Around 11:30 p.m., he woke up to his cell phone ringing. Another firefighter was on the line. “He’d heard that there was an explosion in Cambria,” says Mulhern. “And they were requesting the HURT team.”

Mulhern knew immediately that whatever was happening was likely catastrophic. No one requests HURT unless it’s a dangerous situation where someone is badly hurt, trapped or both.

The fire department’s Heavy Urban Rescue Team is a specialized crew of firefighters and paramedics trained for extraordinary emergencies. When someone gets trapped in a building collapse or there is an accident at a construction site, HURT responds to rescue and provide immediate medical care.

The team was launched after a 1999 emergency at the UW-Madison pharmacy building, which was then under construction. Part of the structure collapsed, trapping a construction worker for three hours. Firefighters rescued the 41-year-old worker, but the department realized it needed more training for industrial accidents. Over the years, the team grew and was formally named HURT in 2007.

The team, which has 57 members, trains to perform rescues in trenches, silos and collapsed buildings. Although it typically only gets seven or eight calls a year, the recovery efforts often make headlines. In 2016, the team helped rescue three boys from an abandoned iron ore mine in Iron Ridge.

Weekly trainings include stints at the state’s Regional Emergency All-Climate Training Center at Volk Field. Other cities have similar teams. Milwaukee has a 90-member unit. Wisconsin Task Force 1 is a collective of 35 first responders stationed in Antigo, Appleton, Beloit, Chippewa Falls, Green Bay, Janesville, La Crosse and Oshkosh.

Although it wasn’t clear at first, the Cambria explosion was exactly the type of situation Madison HURT was created for. After getting the call, Mulhern mobilized the team over the station’s loudspeaker. Assistant Chief Mike Popovich, who had been called by the Dane County emergency dispatch center, arrived at the station moments later, relaying a few more details: Four or five people were missing following an explosion and collapse at a facility called Didion Milling.

While the rest of the HURT members gathered equipment, engineer and paramedic Paul Poker — who joined HURT five years ago because the rescue work was similar to what he’d done in the Army — tried to learn more about the explosion site. “All we knew was that it was called Didion, so we pulled that up on the computer to see what we could find out and see what kind of materials they had. We found out they worked with corn and ethanol,” he recalls. “I was also looking up how to get there because, obviously, we don’t drive to Cambria every day.”

Meanwhile, Popovich and Mulhern sped to the scene to do reconnaissance. Says Popovich: “It’s better to go and not be needed than to have been needed and not have gone.”

Vander Galien’s coworker and childhood friend Alex Wade was also working in the almost-full train car when the explosion blew the car off the railroad tracks and onto its side. “I flew about 20 feet through the air,” Wade says. “The rail car was moving while I was flying. My whole right side and head hit really hard against the side of the rail car. I was knocked out for at least 10 minutes.”

“Collin’s screaming is what finally woke me up,” says Wade, who then scraped through the debris inside the train car to find his friend.

When Vander Galien saw him, he asked, “Do you have your phone? Call 911!” Wade made that panicked emergency call and was told to keep his friend calm but awake. “He was dozing off and I was doing anything I could to keep him awake in any way possible,” says Wade. “There was one point where I was slapping him to keep him awake.”

The first to answer their cries was Cambria high school senior Lee Dunahee. He and his father heard the explosion, which had knocked out the power at their home, a mile away. “We looked out the window and I saw the flames,” Dunahee says. “My dad said, ‘I think Didion blew up.’ I said, ‘We need to do something, we need to go — someone might need help.’”

After hurrying to the plant, Dunahee heard Wade and Vander Galien screaming for help. Yelling back and forth with them, he eventually found them in the train car. When an ambulance arrived, Dunahee directed the EMTs to where Vander Galien was trapped.

The situation looked bleak to Dunahee. He wondered: “Oh, God, what’s going to happen?”

Poker drove himself and four other HURT members the 40 miles to Cambria in a monstrous specialty-rescue vehicle known as Squad 8. Another four firefighters followed in a utility truck. The team weaved along country roads past the cornfields that surrounded Didion Milling, coming up on its south side at about 12:40 a.m.

They were stunned by the devastation. “Cresting the hill and then coming down to it, seeing all the lights, it was just surreal,” says Poker. Smoke filled the air and numerous fire departments were dousing the facility with water from their truck ladders.

From afar, Poker could see that “the concrete [walls had] pancaked like we see in [our training] books. We had no idea how many people were there or what was going on.” The scene reminded him of images from 9/11.

Firefighters were everywhere. Poker noticed uncertainty in their faces. “There were 50 or 60 people there,” he says. “They were looking at us for the answers, wondering what’s going to happen.”

Having arrived earlier, Mulhern knew exactly why the HURT team had been called. “On the north side of the plant, there was a boxcar … on its side — the blast has pushed it over,” he recalls. “There’s a person inside and his legs are sticking out of the car. There’s a jangle of concrete and steel and different things around and hanging from above. A number of train cars are leaning over and some are all the way over, so we didn’t know the stability of any of it.”

The team learned that the man pinned underneath the car was Vander Galien. Paramedics “had an IV going on him already,” says Mulhern, adding that not far from the overturned train car he found what he assumes was Vander Galien’s “foot in a tennis shoe, severed right off at the ankle.”

The loading area where Vander Galien was trapped was set back from the road by more than 100 yards, says Poker. The path to him was treacherous. “It was a long walk,” he says. “You had to crawl under rail cars just to get back there. There was so much water. And it was night time.”

“We couldn’t even tell it was a train car because there were thick concrete [walls] covering it,” he adds. He heard someone say “He’s down here,” so Poker climbed up the fallen concrete walls and made his way down into the train car by stepping down onto a pallet that was up on its end.

Inside the car were two paramedics and a Med Flight doctor. “It was tight quarters. There were bags of corn laying around,” he remembers. “It was hard to figure out what we were even looking at.”

Mulhern, Poker and the others debated how to free Vander Galien. The HURT truck carries huge airbags that can inflate to lift large debris but they weren’t sure the bags could hoist such a heavy load — the train weighed as much as 250,000 pounds. They also worried that during the lift, the collapsed walls leaning on the train might fall on the victim and rescuers. Their next idea was to cut through the train frame with a torch but that was also dangerous in such close quarters.

Their next option — the only one left — was to amputate.

Vander Galien was stable and sedated, so the team had time to call in a surgeon. They reached Dr. Eric Anderson, who was at Divine Savior hospital in Portage treating explosion victims for burns. He grabbed a surgical technician and an anesthesiologist and raced 30 miles to the scene.

When he arrived at Didion, says Anderson, “it looked like a bomb went off. It was dark and wet and smelled like corn. Corn dust everywhere — it’s a very fine powder, almost like sand but finer.”

By then, Vander Galien had two tourniquets on his upper thighs and a harness around his chest to help lift him out once he was free. Anderson had the paramedics give Vander Galien more pain meds “so he wouldn’t feel anything or remember anything,” went over the amputation plan with Poker and the others, and “then we did what we had to do.”

Once the decision was made, Poker says, “we figured it would go quick.”

It didn’t.

Anderson first used a surgical knife to cut through the skin of the legs on Vander Galien’s calves between his knees and where the train car frame had him pinned down. He then cut through the calf muscles and other flesh of both legs using a surgical saw. Next, he used an orthopedic bone saw to cut the lower leg bones. Or so he thought.

“It looks like everything’s going perfect and [Anderson] says ‘I’m through,’” remembers Poker, who was at Vander Galien’s right side. “Then he reaches through for the other side, does the same thing and says he’s through.”

“Then, we get ready and say on the count of three we’re going to lift,” continues Poker. “But [Vander Galien] doesn’t move. I’ve got firefighters lifting with everything they have and he doesn’t budge.”

“We tried to lift again and he still doesn’t move and my heart sank. I reach down in there and I’m feeling around and I can feel where [Anderson] cut the tissue away and I can feel where the bone is still intact with my fingertips,” remembers Poker. “I don’t know if his saw was sliding off or partially cutting through. I said ‘Doc, you’re not through.’”

In hindsight, Anderson believes “the saw got bogged down in all the water” and stopped working.

With Vander Galien’s flesh and bone now exposed, the rescuers had to think fast. “I was getting nervous and I wanted him out,” remembers Poker. “So, that’s when I asked for the Sawzall.”

Made by the Milwaukee Tool company, a Sawzall is a two-handed reciprocating cutting tool used by construction workers that has a serrated blade that cuts in a rapid, stabbing, back-and-forth motion. “That was the best tool we could think of at the time,” explains Poker. “So they hand it down and we get going.”

Sawzall in hand, Poker begins cutting. “And then, the battery dies,” he says. “I get the second one on and start again and then the second battery dies. I’m thinking ‘Are you kidding me?’”

With the third battery now in use, Poker begins cutting again. Finally, “I felt when I cut through,” he says. “I handed the Sawzall to the other paramedic who then cut through the rest of the second leg.”

“So then, we figure we got this and we go to lift him out again,” continues Poker. “He moved some, but he’s not coming all the way out. His jeans were still caught.”

After cutting his jeans free, “we lifted him and he finally went up and through,” Poker says. Firefighters and paramedics in the train car passed him up through the opening. “I remember when they pulled him up there, what was left of his legs were right there, so we passed them up.”

Vander Galien fortunately remembers little of this. “I was down there for four hours,” he says. “I remember two and a half hours of it.” “The last thing I remember was them … lifting me up and that was it.”

Once Vander Galien was out of the train car, he was secured to a stretcher, had his vital signs checked, airway secured and tourniquets tightened. A Med Flight helicopter took him to UW Hospital for further surgery.

Around 6 a.m., after some five hours at the explosion site, the exhausted rescue team headed back to Station 8. The events of that morning have stayed with them.

“I think about it often. All the training in the world can’t prepare you for what went on there that day and, I hope it’s a once in a lifetime situation,” says Poker, a 12-year veteran of the fire department. “There were some very difficult decisions that had to be made. I hope Collin does well in the long run — that’s the number one thing. I hope he knows we did everything we could to give him the best outcome possible.”

“We were trying to save his life,” he concludes. “And we did. Unfortunately, it came at the expense of his legs.”

Five of Vander Galien’s co-workers died from the explosion. The bodies of Pawel Tordoff, Robert Goodenow and Duelle Block were found in the rubble in the days following the accident and Carlos Nunez and Angel Reyes, who were rescued before Vander Galien, died in June from injuries they sustained in the blast.

Two weeks ago, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Didion Milling $1.8 million for the accident, ruling it was likely a grain dust explosion that could have been averted. “Didion Milling could have prevented this tragedy if it had addressed hazards that are well known in this industry,” OSHA’s Ken Nishiyama Atha said in a release. “Instead, their disregard for the law led to an explosion that claimed the lives of workers, and heartbreak for their families and the community.”

In a statement, Didion said it “does not agree with the severity of the penalties levied against our family-owned business or the conclusions released by OSHA today. We are working with our legal counsel to determine how to address the findings.” It also pledged to rebuild a “state-of-the-art, best in class facility.”

Everyone who’s come in contact with Vander Galien, now 23, praises his attitude. His days now are full with doctor and physical therapy appointments. He also hunts and fishes with friends and has adopted a puppy he named Simba.

He’s determined to continue playing basketball. “The goal is to get back on the court” using his new prosthetic legs, he says. “But that’s going to be a process. Maybe in a couple years.” In October he met Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo. “That was probably one of the best times of my life,” he says.

Getting his prosthetic legs was a milestone in his recovery. He began learning to walk with them just two months after the explosion. “Before I got my legs, I would struggle going to sleep. I would think about the accident and all that happened,” he says. “Once I got my legs, I just don’t think about it all that much anymore. I’m trying to stay positive.”

Vander Galien is not able to sue Didion, because Wisconsin law prohibits employees from suing their employers. And he is unsure how he’ll make a living. “I don’t know what I’m going to do and it’s really starting to bother me,” he says. “I’d like to do something in sports but I don’t have a degree.”

He hopes to land a job with “the Bucks G League program, which is like a step below the NBA and they’re just starting that this year in Oshkosh,” he says. “Or maybe a YMCA gig.”

Vander Galien won’t return to Didion Milling. “Even if it’s an office job or whatever, I do not want to go back. I can’t,” he says. “It’s only been six months. I lost both legs. I nearly died. And people are talking to me about going back to work at Didion? No.”

He’s currently receiving workers compensation, but is unsure how long that will last. He knows he’ll eventually have to find a way to make a living, especially since he’ll have to replace his prosthetic legs every few years. Pointing to his left leg, which is a high-tech, military grade prosthetic made in Germany, he says, “This one costs $160,000 and the other one is $20,000. They only last five to seven years. I can’t afford that.”

Next week, his truck will be outfitted with hand controls.

“I’m trying to make a normal life. My friends treat me the same, my parents treat me the same. But in the back of my mind, I know what I’ve been through. [Being trapped] underneath that train was absolute hell,” he says. “I just keep praying that everything works out.”