DANVERS — A Riverside Street woman might have saved a clue to the Danversport ink and paint plant explosion by letting it sit under her shed for months.
The clue in question is a piece of pipe, 24 inches long, with a valve attached. It landed by a tree in front of Janet Lettich's house at 12 Riverside St. the morning of Nov. 22, 2006, when the chemical plant blew up two blocks away.
When she and her husband, Mark, ran from their house that morning, cinder blocks and pipes littered the street.
"The pipes were everywhere," she said.
Thinking it could have flown into her bedroom window, Lettich kept the valve and later tossed it under a shed, where it lay rusting for the past year and a half. She didn't think much of it until a few days ago when a landscape crew removed the shed, and she spotted the valve.
Investigators from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board presented a report Tuesday night that pinpointed a steam valve left on as the cause of the explosion that blew apart the neighborhood.
Right off the bat, board member Gary Visscher picked up on this and wanted to know if investigators had found the valve.
"Unfortunately, no," said lead investigator John Vorderbrueggen. It or other valves like it were either destroyed or blown into the community, he said.
So when Lettich mentioned offhand after the meeting that she'd found a valve, she raised the eyebrows of Daniel Horowitz, the CSB's director of public affairs.
"He wanted me to take a picture of it and send it to him in Washington, D.C.," she said, which she did.
Lettich and her husband are known to CSB investigators. She was one of the residents featured in a video dramatization of what happened that morning.
It is unknown if this valve had anything to do with the explosion, and board officials could not be reached yesterday afternoon after repeated calls. But there's at least one similarity.
Like the valve investigators sought, Lettich's is a quarter-turn valve — pushing the lever up a quarter-turn opens it, pushing it down closes it. The valve handle is yellow with the word "Apollo" on it.
Investigators Tuesday described a scenario where a production manager for ink maker CAI Inc. had inadvertently left open a steam valve on a mixing tank, allowing a 2,000-gallon batch of "ink vehicle" to boil, release flammable vapors and ignite.
The worker, however, told investigators, "I believe I closed the steam valve," according to the report.
Could Lettich's valve be the one that caused the explosion? Lettich doesn't think so, and the odds are against it. A rendering of the mix tank in the report shows at least four such valves to control steam and other functions on the tank. And there were four of these tanks that belonged to CAI, along with other equipment in the facility.
Besides, the valve Lettich found was in the "off" position.
