The site manager at Bayer CropScience says it may take time to find out exactly what caused the explosion at their Institute plant that killed one worker and critically injured another. "It's been a terrible, terrible 24-hours for us. The family here at Institute is absolutely devastated by what's happened,” said Site Manager Nick Crosby.

Veteran plant worker Barry Withrow of Cross Lanes was killed in the blast and the injured worker was taken to West Penn Burn Center in Pittsburgh. A third worker was treated for heat exposure at the scene.

Crosby says the other six employees who work in the unit where the blast took place have not yet been questioned. "They're shellshocked. They've lost a family member. It's terrible,” Crosby said Friday afternoon. “Our immediate priority is to the people who work here. When we've got those people in a better state of mind, then at that stage we will start to concentrate on the process and what went wrong."

Grief counselors were brought in late Thursday night to talk with employees and they'll continue to work with those who need assistance. Crosby says they've seen signs of posttraumatic stress in some workers.        

Federal and state investigators are in charge of the initial investigation. Crosby says the company is holding back on its own inquiry until the feds and state have completed their work. But he adds they will get to the bottom of the disaster. "We don't know what's caused this incident but we're going to find out and we're going to fix it,” he said.

The blast emanated from a unit where waste products are treated before disposal. Bayer shut down that unit in April for routine maintenance and restarted it just a week ago. Crosby describes what was inside. "The residue is actually in a solvent which we clean up and we try to be environmentally friendly by sending that to our boiler house and we use it as a substitute fuel. So it's not really a part of the manufacturing process itself, it's part of the downstream solvent clean up,” he said.

The solvent has a strong chemical odor that remained in the air around the plant most of Friday morning. The blast did little damage outside the gates of the plant, but an oil distributor across the Kanawha River from the Bayer complex ended up with six shattered large pane windows from the force of the blast.

The last explosion at the plant was more than a decade ago and not nearly as serious as the one that took place Friday night. Longtime residents say you have to go back to the 1950s to find anything comparable.

Crosby says the workers and management need time to decompress but is making a promise to the community. "We will be starting an investigation as soon as we possibly can and I can assure you there is no way that we will be starting our unit up until we've got to the root cause of this problem and fixed it,” he said. 

Witnesses as far away as Lincoln County reported feeling the explosion.  "It's just insane that we actually heard it all the way over here," says Brianna Warner in Alkol.

"I was sitting in my house and I heard a big old explosion and looked outside and saw the fireball and ran outside to see what it was because I thought, maybe it was the apartments across the street, and I could tell it was the chemical plant," Witness Joe Huffman said.  He was close to the Bayer Crop Science Plant at the time.

Kanawha County Emergency Services had issued a shelter in place for South Charleston, Dunbar, Jefferson, St. Albans, Nitro, Cross Lanes and Institute.  That shelter in place was lifted at about two o'clock on Friday morning.