CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Past, Present, and Future Dead

“…sensitivity toward destructiveness-cruelty is rapidly diminishing, and necrophilia, the attraction to what is dead, decaying, lifeless, and purely mechanical, is increasing throughout our cybernetic industrial society… [this] threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine.” — Erich Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)

“…sensitivity toward destructiveness-cruelty is rapidly diminishing, and necrophilia, the attraction to what is dead, decaying, lifeless, and purely mechanical, is increasing throughout our cybernetic industrial society… [this] threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine.”

— Erich Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)

The Nippon Dynawave industrial accident, Coffin Rock, and ecological collapse

It’s last November. My family and I drive to a small town on the Washington side of the Columbia River (called the Wimaɬ to the upper Chinookan peoples, Imaɬ to the lower Chinookans, and Nchʼi-Wàna in Yakama) to visit with a dear friend who is very ill. We pull off State Route 432 to refuel on the outskirts of the industrial riverfront city Longview, 40 miles from Portland.

As we wait, I wander across the parking lot. On the far side is a deep canal — “ditch number five,” a channelized tributary of the Columbia River. In this floodplain, now dedicated to warehouses and industrial sites, the river is forced into unnatural shapes. Overhead, high-power electric lines carry energy from hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, wind turbine arrays, and solar installations to industrial sites along the river.

“Ditch number five.” Photo by the author.

Across the road is one of those sites, built tight to the river to take advantage of its ability to carry bargeloads of cargo. A smokestack pumps great billowing masses of pollution into the air.

It is common in our culture to turn away from industrial atrocities. They are the dirty underbelly of modernity. Ugly. They make the cost of our way of life hard to ignore, and so most people simply let their eyes slide away. This is wrong. We must truly look in order to understand reality, and we must understand in order to change. I can’t look away.

The Nippon Dynawave facility in November 2025. Video by the author.

What I did not realize that day was that the facility I was looking at was the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Company, a Japanese-owned cardboard manufacturing facility originally constructed by Weyerhaueser between 1953 and 1955.

Located directly behind the smokestack was a 35-foot-tall storage tank containing half a million gallons of an incredibly dangerous, highly toxic substance called white liquor.

That tank was about to fail.

Photograph by the Washington State Department of Ecology. CC BY-NC 4.0.

It happened just before 7:15am on the morning of on May 26th, 2026.

As dawn broke and workers arrived for shift change at the Nippon Dynawave plant, the structural integrity of the 35-foot tank failed spectacularly. In seconds, more than 570,000 gallons of a toxic chemical called “white liquor” spewed forth with enough force to flip cars and smash walls.

White liquor is a chemical solution made up of sodium hydroxide (lye) and sodium sulfide, and it is caustic — incredibly so. Measuring a 14 on the pH scale, it is one of the most “basic” substances known; material like that can kill a human being instantly, dissolving fats and proteins and eating through skin.

That is what happened. As 570,000 gallons of it cascaded across the work site, nine people were killed; two more would die in the hospital soon afterwards.

Their names were Gilberto Bernal, Tyler Covington, Dale Miller, Jared Ammons, Bradley Covington, Clinton Doran, John Forsberg, Norman Barlow, Robert Wilson, Braydon Finkas, and Dillon Miller.

Seven additional workers and one firefighter, responding to the scene, were sent to the hospital with injuries.

The white liquor mixed with water from a broken water pipe, flowed into the storm drains and then into “ditch number five” and into the Columbia. Dead fish began to bob to the surface. Underwater and along the shoreline, frogs, snails, insects, birds, small mammals, and other life forms died.

Dead fish observed around the site. Photos via the Washington State Department of Ecology. CC BY-NC 4.0.

The Desecrated Burial Site

Weeks after the accident, I am looking at a satellite picture of the Nippon Dynawave facility, trying to confirm that I had indeed been looking at this facility on that dark November evening. I had been.

Satellite image of the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Company facility in Longview, WA. The Columbia River is located in the lower left. The gas station is along the center of the right side of the image. The white liquor tank which collapsed is located near the center of the image, appearing as a small, white-roofed, round structure.

In the satellite image, the tank — visible as a white-roofed, round structure with cars parked on two sides of it — remains intact. Rail lines, digester tanks, docks for unloading raw materials, and the neighboring NORPAC facility, which purchases pulp from Nippon Dynawave and makes it into paper for use in printers, books, cardboard boxes, grocery bags, and more, are clearly visible.

But it is something else that catches my eye.

Near the river, in what seems to be the parking lot of the facility’s ship unloading area, a small label reads “Coffin Rock Burial Ground.” I click the icon. Nothing. I search the name. Still nothing. I go the second page of results, then the third, then finally find what I am looking for.

It is the history of this place, now buried under a chemically-contaminated parking lot. Stefan Krause tells the story:

When Royal Navy Lieutenant William R. Broughton—commander of the HMS Chatham and important member of the Vancouver expedition—began his journey on the Columbia River in October 1792, he was the second European explorer in these waters. The American Robert Gray sailed down the river only a few weeks earlier and named it after his vessel: the Columbia. Broughton, however, drew a very detailed map of the river, recording and naming several geographical features along the Columbia River. One of these features “was a remarkable mount, about which were placed several canoes, containing dead bodies,” which he named ‘Mount Coffin.’..

When Royal Navy Lieutenant William R. Broughton—commander of the HMS Chatham and important member of the Vancouver expedition—began his journey on the Columbia........

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