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Tales of Vegas Past: PEPCON explosion was Henderson turning point

By Gregory Crosby

One of the pleasures of being a college student back in May of 1988 was the ability to sleep in on days that I didn't have classes. I was indeed sound asleep late in the morning on May 4 in my girlfriend's apartment when a loud, unnatural sound roused me. I didn't at first, in my groggy state, perceive it to be an explosion. It was more like a sonic boom from a jet passing high over head. A few moments later, a tremor rumbled through my bed as a much louder and larger sound wave rolled over me. I came fully awake; no mistaking that sound. Something had exploded, and my heart raced when my girlfriend's roommate rushed in, claiming there was a mushroom cloud hanging over Henderson.

After that initial stab of panic (Henderson? I thought stupidly, why would they bomb Henderson?), I quickly realized the city wasn't under attack. But something serious had happened, an explosion of a magnitude not seen in the Las Vegas Valley before or since. It was an industrial accident that took two lives, injured more than 300 people, destroyed two facilities and shattered windows on business, homes and schools for miles around. It was the PEPCON disaster.

The blast sounded as if it had been right on top of me, and I was at Valley View and Spring Mountain. But it had occurred miles away, at a rocket fuel plant in Henderson owned by PEPCON. For decades, the plant, just one of many in what was then the "City of Industry" in Vegas' glittering shadow, manufactured ammonium perchlorate, used in NASA's space shuttle program and in the Titan missile program. A fire broke out that morning, one that workers couldn't contain, and led to the first, smaller explosion. That was lucky: It raised the alarm that enabled most workers to escape before a second explosion occurred on the heels of the first. But it was the third, massive blast that sealed the plant's fate, when 9 million pounds of the chemical literally went up in smoke; a thundering, shuddering convulsion that rattled the surrounding area like an earthquake. The blast was so powerful it knocked a fire engine arriving on the scene two lanes over, and in some instances overturned cars. PEPCON employees Roy Westerfield and Bruce Halker were killed as they both herded others out of the area.

Next door, the Kidd & Co. marshmallow plant took the full brunt of the explosion, but fortunately it had been quickly evacuated at the first sign of trouble next door (one of its lines wasn't functioning, which meant there were, thankfully, fewer employees working than on an ordinary day). The factory was destroyed by fire, even as it became clear that the PEPCON facility had nearly ceased to exist. The vast plume of smoke could be seen for miles around as anxious residents all over the city stepped outside to discover the source of the jolt, many stepping over shards of broken glass from their blown-out windows. The ultimate price tag in terms of property damage from the blast was put at $74 million.

It had been, alas, only a matter of time before such an incident occurred in Henderson, a city founded around the Basic Magnesium plant of the 1940s that had contributed to the war effort. The laws of probability dictated that a town that prided itself on its many factories and manufacturing sites would sooner or later suffer an industrial accident on a large scale, and the PEPCON factory was primed to give it that incident: Since 1974 it had been cited numerous times for safety violations, including a small 1980 explosion that injured a worker. Fire officials later concluded it was that longtime factory fire culprit, sparks from a welder's torch, that had started the fires that led to the destruction, though PEPCON officials would later try to shift the blame onto Southwest Gas by claiming it was a ruptured gas line, an explanation at great variance with witnesses on the scene (it was sheer luck that more lives weren't lost; had the third explosion happened first, the death toll likely would have been very high).

The PEPCON disaster also signaled in its own way the moment when Henderson began its shift from "City of Industry" to bedroom community. The Green Valley master-planned community opened a few years before the accident, leading the way. PEPCON never rebuilt the facility, ultimately moving its operations to outside Cedar City, Utah, and over the next decade, many factories closed, replaced by the relentless creep of subdivisions toward Black Mountain. Though many industries remain in Henderson, it is today a full-fledged suburb of Las Vegas, having traded the scary boom times of the PEPCON blast for the boom times of real estate development.