Former NRA CEO must repay $4.3 million for misappropriating money, court rules

(LONGVIEW, Wash.) — A second employee has died after a chemical tank ruptured at a paper mill in Washington state, officials said Wednesday.

Nine people remain missing, as recovery efforts are underway a day after the incident, officials said.

“We’re bracing ourselves for this being the deadliest industrial tragedy in modern Washington state history,” Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson said during a press briefing on Wednesday.

“When you have a tragedy of that scale, the impacts on individuals, on families and on communities is profound,” he said. “I want to extend my deepest condolences to those who have been directly impacted by the loss of a loved one during this extraordinarily challenging time.”

Fire authorities said the “hazardous materials incident” was reported Tuesday morning at Nippon Dynawave Packaging, a pulp and paper mill in Longview, a city of 38,000 people about 50 miles northwest of Portland.

The response transitioned from rescue to recovery as of Wednesday morning, Cowlitz2 Fire & Rescue Chief Scott Goldstein said during Wednesday’s press briefing.

“I want to acknowledge again the tremendous support that we have received from our state and regional and federal partners, but more specifically the tremendous impact that this incident continues to have on the victims, the families, the coworkers, my responders, all the agencies, responders, and the broader community,” he said. “Understand that there are members working the site tirelessly that have lost coworkers, lost friends, and they remain dedicated to focusing on our recovery efforts.”

The effort to recover the nine employees will be “slow, methodical and deliberate,” Longview Fire Battalion Chief Matt Amos said during the press briefing on Wednesday.

“The priority is ensuring responder safety while treating every victim with the greatest dignity, care, and respect as possible,” he said.

Authorities said recovery efforts were delayed due to safety concerns over the unstable tank, which contains white liquor, a chemical mixture used in the paper-making process.

The remaining product in the damaged 900,000-gallon tank is roughly 25,000 gallons, a “significantly smaller volume” than initially believed, “allowing emergency responders to develop a plan to move forward to remove it,” local authorities and Nippon Dynawave Packaging said in a joint statement Wednesday. The tank is believed to have been about 60% full at the time of the rupture, authorities said.

The tank ruptured at approximately 7:15 a.m. Tuesday, resulting in the release of white liquor, officials said. Authorities initially referred to the incident as a chemical explosion and then an implosion, before referring to it as a rupture and blast.

“There was a rupture, a failure, a blast,” Goldstein said. “All of those to us mean the same. It’s not why it happened, it’s the damage that we observe. Vehicles are damaged, buildings are damaged, mechanical equipment is damaged, collapsed and failed.”

There was a shift change around the time, with employees in their workspaces when the blast occurred, he said. Authorities have not found any video recording of the incident, he said.

One of the injured employees transported to the hospital following the incident has since died, officials said Wednesday, bringing the confirmed number of fatalities to two.

The Cowlitz County Coroner’s Office will release the names of the deceased “when all individuals have been recovered and family notifications are complete,” officials said Wednesday.

Family identified one of the deceased employees as Gilbert Bernal, a beloved husband, dad and grandfather.

“My father was the most selfless man I knew,” Bernal’s daughter, Geovana Bernal, said in a statement to ABC News on Tuesday. “He worked hard to provide for his family and he loved us so much.”

Geovana Bernal said her brother viewed images of her father and confirmed his death after speaking with the coroner’s office.

Seven other employees suffered injuries in the incident, including chemical burns, and remain hospitalized, authorities said Wednesday.

One firefighter was also injured in the incident and has since been treated and released from a nearby hospital, according to authorities.

The cause of the rupture is unknown, Goldstein said Tuesday.

White liquor is a chemical mixture of sodium hydroxide, sodium sulfide and disodium carbonate used in the paper-making process, according to Goldstein.

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board said Wednesday it is opening an investigation into the incident “to determine how it happened and what can be done to prevent something like this from happening again.”

A team of CSB investigators will be arriving at the incident site in Longview on Wednesday.

The Washington State Department of Labor and Industries said it is also investigating.

There is no direct threat to the public, authorities said.

Contamination was confirmed to have entered the nearby Columbia River, Goldstein said Wednesday, with mitigation efforts and more testing underway “to better understand the scope and extent of that environmental impact.”

The Washington State Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are helping monitor air and water quality, officials said Wednesday.

“At this time, there are no negative health impacts to air quality or the City of Longview’s drinking water system,” officials said Wednesday. “The public is asked to keep away from ditches and dikes in the city while water testing is underway.”

The Nippon facility is located on the Washington-Oregon border near the Columbia River. The kraft pulp and paper mill and liquid packaging plant employs around 1,000 people, according to the Washington Department of Ecology.

“On behalf of NDP, these are our people,” Brian Wood, director of support services for Nippon Dynawave Packaging, said during Wednesday’s briefing. “We are focused on our people. We are focused on helping our responders find and recover those things. That is our people. That is our focus today.”

“We are profoundly grateful for the people behind me, for the responders and what they’ve done with us and for us,” he continued.

Wood said the company will cooperate with investigators and they “look forward to a full and complete investigation.”

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(NEW YORK) — The severe weather threat is expected to ramp down this weekend after one more day of possible severe storms.

There is a slight risk for severe storms in Ohio, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania and western New York. This includes Buffalo, New York; Cleveland; Pittsburgh; and Charleston, West Virginia.

Damaging winds and some large hail will be the main threat, but a tornado and some isolated flash flooding cannot be ruled out.

Remnant showers and storms moved along a cold front sweeping the Ohio Valley Saturday morning before rejuvenating later in the afternoon.

The level of severity of these storms will be determined by how the atmosphere recovers after preceding rain moving through Saturday morning, but enough energy could build up by late Saturday afternoon for some severe storms to develop over the area. Otherwise, it may just end up being added rain with possibly some rumbles of thunder.

This cold front will continue to push east into the Northeast on Sunday, bringing rain, and some high elevation snow, to the region before pushing off the coast.

Ahead of this cold front, the Southeast has had another day or record heat while the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic begin to cool down.

Saturday could see one more day of record highs across much of the South from Louisiana to Florida to Georgia.

The National Weather Service confirmed at least 35 tornadoes across 10 states this week, stretching from California to Vermont.

Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois have been hit the hardest by multiple outbreaks of severe weather over the week.

Friday was no exception to this active week of severe weather, with more than 300 reports of severe weather from Oklahoma up to Minnesota and east to Indiana.

Wind gusts over 75 mph were also reported in Missouri, Iowa and Illinois. Hail larger than baseballs were reported in Illinois and Oklahoma. Oklahoma, Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin reported hail greater than golf balls.

In addition, flooding continues to linger for parts of Wisconsin and Michigan from days of rain and, in some areas, on top of a deep snowpack that’s accelerated snowmelt. Fortunately, they have drier weather in the forecast for this weekend into next week.

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(NEW YORK) — It’s been 100 years since the 1st modern rocket launched. Humans are heading back to the moon

The experiment lasted only two and a half seconds, but it ignited a century of space exploration that sent humans to low Earth orbit and eventually to the moon.

On March 16, 1926, Robert H. Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket on a snowy farm in Massachusetts. Historians say that Goddard’s 10-foot rocket would pave the way for the modern machines that do everything from putting satellites in orbit to sending humans to the International Space Station and beyond.

“His unlocking of that ability to use liquid fuel really just sets the stage for any other country around the world that is launching rockets,” Ed Stewart, a curator at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, told ABC News. “It all comes back down to March 16 in 1926 because he was the one that proved that it could be done and then actually did it.”
The rocket was the first of its kind, powered by liquid propellant rather than gunpowder or other solid fuels used by most rockets at the time, according to NASA. The rocket flew for less than three seconds and reached an altitude of about 41 feet.

While scientists overseas had already been experimenting with rocketry in places like Russia and Germany, according to historical documents, it was Goddard’s 1919 paper, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” that made the physicist’s discovery famous worldwide, explained Stewart.

“It caught the attention of people all around the world, even people that were doing some experimentation with rockets and liquid fuels and things like that in other parts of the world,” Stewart said.

The paper suggested that rockets could one day travel to the moon and caught the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, which invested money in rocket research.

“I think the breakthrough was, first of all, that Goddard had this dream of getting a rocket ship off the surface of the Earth,” said Charles “Chuck” Agosta, a physics professor at Goddard’s alma mater, Clark University. “And then, of course, the dream was to go to Mars.”

Other scientists, like Hermann Oberth of Germany, later built on Goddard’s theory, and that progress eventually contributed to the development of the V-2 rocket, Stewart noted. And eventually, rockets based on Goddard’s pioneering work led to sending astronauts into space and to the moon.

Goddard earned his master’s and doctorate in physics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, before returning to teach at the school in 1914. He eventually served as director of the physics department for two decades.

Today, faculty at Clark say his legacy still looms large on campus.

Goddard once used a bicycle wheel to show funding agencies how gyroscopes could help steer rockets in space. Today, Agosta uses that same wheel to teach his students about angular momentum.

Despite his legacy, Goddard’s breakthrough didn’t immediately capture the public’s imagination. Stewart says that when the first liquid-fueled rocket launched, space travel was still widely viewed as science fiction by many.

“I do think that at the time it was still so far-fetched that even once he proved that the basic version of the technology would work, people still were thinking of it more as a novelty,” Stewart said.

Much of what we know about those early experiments comes from Goddard’s wife, Esther Christine Kisk Goddard, a photographer from Worcester, Mass. She documented many of the tests, leaving behind footage that offers a window into the creation of the world’s first modern rockets.

According to NASA, Goddard created and launched more than 35 rockets throughout his lifetime. It was because of his pioneering work in modern rocketry that, in May 1959, NASA renamed its first spaceflight complex to the “Goddard Space Flight Center.”

The center is home to missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch as early as fall 2026.

The global return to the moon and beyond

During his initial launch tests, Goddard fueled his rocket with gasoline and liquid oxygen, according to the Roswell Museum in New Mexico, where the physicist spent part of his career. Today’s modern rockets no longer use gasoline, opting for other fuels such as liquid hydrogen, liquid methane and refined kerosene along with liquid oxygen, which acts as an oxidizer.

On the 100th anniversary of Goddard’s discovery, the United States is on the cusp of sending the first astronauts to the moon since 1972 as part of the Artemis II mission. The 10-day trip will send four astronauts around the far side of the moon in NASA’s Orion spacecraft, launched into orbit by the most powerful rocket ever to send people into space. A rocket that may never have come to fruition had Goddard not experimented on that faithful day in 1926.

What could the next 100 years of rocket technology bring?

“I’m pretty confident that in a hundred years, we’re going to be all over space,” Agosta said.

Considering the thousands of airplanes in our own skies every day, he says it’s “inevitable” and that we’ll “at least be in the planets close to us” by the next century.

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