Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

“This is three-seven,” Frost told the command post at McConnell Air Force Base. “The locks are on the safe and the keys are in it. We got one man possibly down and we’re evacuating now.”

Thomas died on the floor, staring at the ceiling.

“Where’s the dep, where’s the dep?” Wessel shouted, calling for Frost, their deputy commander. They were getting tired, and they needed his help to open the escape hatch. The light grew dimmer as the control center filled with oxidizer.

Malinger didn’t want to leave Thomas behind. It seemed wrong. After getting knocked down by the powerful stream of oxidizer, Malinger had gotten lost in the silo, near the base of the missile, unable to see more than a few feet, unaware that Hepstall had taken the elevator and left him down there. Sergeant Thomas had found him and brought him out, and now Malinger didn’t want to leave Thomas on the floor.

“We’ll get him later,” Frost said, heading downstairs to work on the hatch.

Matthews helped Malinger and Hepstall down the stairs and then helped them take off their RFHCO suits. They said their skin was burning. “My God, please help me,” Hepstall said. “It’s in here with me, it’s with me.”

Matthews went back upstairs and checked the other two levels of the control center, looking for stragglers, just in case. The cloud of oxidizer was now so thick that he couldn’t see more than two or three feet ahead.

The escape hatch was open, finally. Wessel went into it first, crawled through the tunnel, and climbed the ladder as fast as he could. It felt like climbing up a chimney full of smoke, as the oxidizer filled the narrow air shaft. At the top, Wessel pulled the pins and then pushed the metal grating open with his head. Wong was right behind him, and then Frost, who’d paused every few rungs to pull Hepstall up the ladder. Frost wanted to help him — and didn’t want him falling onto Malinger. Lieutenant Matthews went last, closing the hatch behind him to trap the oxidizer in the control center.

The missile crew carried the two injured PTS technicians to the emergency showers on the hardstand to rinse them off. The showers didn’t work.

“Get them under the fire hydrant,” Matthews said.

The crew put Hepstall and Malinger in front of the hydrant and turned it on. Water poured out, and then after a few seconds the hydrant sputtered air and quit. They had to get these men rinsed off, immediately. But the gate to the launch complex was locked. No one had remembered to unlock it before abandoning the control center, and the trucks were parked on the other side of the fence. With help from some of the PTS technicians, the missile crew carried Hepstall and Malinger through the breakaway panel in the fence and placed them in the bed of a pickup.

The crew drove to a nearby farmhouse, and warned the occupants that deadly fumes were rising from the silo. Wong said to leave the area at once — and Frost asked to use their phone. Wessel found a garden hose in the backyard. After spraying the two airmen with water, they drove Hepstall and Malinger to the nearest hospital.

A cloud of oxidizer floated from the launch complex, extending for about a mile and drifting toward the town of Rock, Kansas. The cloud looked like a dark, ominous thunderhead. Local residents didn’t know what it was, and the cars and trucks on Highway 77 drove right through it. Air Force security police soon evacuated the roughly two hundred inhabitants of Rock.

Sergeant Thomas had been left behind, and none of the PTS crew members felt right about that. Even though he was gone, they thought, he shouldn’t be lying down there, alone. Two men volunteered to get him: Mirl Linthicum, the team chief trainee, and Airman John G. Korzenko. They returned to the launch complex and put on RFHCO suits. Linthicum climbed into the escape hatch first, followed by Korzenko. Within seconds, Korzenko had climbed out; oxidizer was leaking into his suit. Linthicum came back moments later; he wasn’t getting enough air in his helmet.

Another PTS team arrived from McConnell, with fresh RFHCO suits and air packs. They wanted to get Thomas out, too. Airman Middland R. Jackson put on a RFHCO and climbed into the escape hatch. He came right back; his helmet was leaking. Jackson grabbed another helmet, tried the escape hatch again, and climbed the ladder all the way to the bottom in his RFHCO. But he’d never been in the escape hatch before, and the oxidizer was so thick down there he couldn’t find the entrance to the control center. He climbed back up the ladder, frustrated and yet determined not to quit.

A few minutes later, Jackson and two other PTS technicians in RFHCOs, Technical Sergeant John C. Mock and Airman Michael L. Greenwell, tried to enter the control center through the access portal. They wandered underground through dense clouds of oxidizer, literally feeling their way down the stairs and through blast doors. They could not see more than a foot or so ahead — and had to stick together because none of their radios worked. They made it to the control center, found Sergeant Thomas on the floor, and carried his body onto the elevator. But no matter how many times they pushed the buttons, the elevator wouldn’t work. They decided to carry Thomas up the stairs. His body was heavy, their suits felt heavy, and it was hot down there. After a few minutes, they couldn’t carry him any farther and had to leave his body on the stairs. Two more PTS technicians in RFHCOs, Sergeant James Romig and Airman Gregory W. Anderson, went down and carried him, then had to quit, because of the heat. The five men took turns going into the complex and carrying Thomas as far as they could. As soon as one group got tired, the other would step in. It took two hours to get Thomas up the stairs and out of the complex.

An investigation of the accident later found the cause of the leak. Someone hadn’t put a filter inside the oxidizer line. But the small rubber O-ring designed to hold the filter had been left inside the line. The O-ring blocked the poppet valve from closing fully, allowing oxidizer to pour out. Nobody accepted responsibility for failing to insert the filter. Oxidizer flowed more quickly without a filter in place — and someone may have deliberately omitted the filter to save time and load the tank quickly.

The blast door leading to the control center wouldn’t open because someone had propped open the blast door across from it with a bungee cord — and both doors couldn’t be open at the same time. Hepstall had used the manual override to unlock blast door 8, and by entering the control center, he’d contaminated it with oxidizer.

Robert J. Thomas was killed by a leak in his RFHCO, most likely at the spot where it intersected with the left glove. Oxidizer may have poured into the suit as he tried to reconnect the line to the missile. The Air Force recommended, in the future, that black vinyl electrical tape be used to seal the interface between the glove and the RFHCO suit more securely. Thomas left a widow and two young sons.

Erby Hepstall died a week and a half later, at the age of twenty-two, his lungs destroyed by oxidizer. His son had just turned two. A small tear in the left leg of Hepstall’s RFHCO suit, about seven eighths of an inch long, had allowed oxidizer to enter it.

Carl Malinger had a stroke, went into a coma, suffered lung and kidney damage, lost the use of his left arm, and spent the next several months in the hospital. He’d enlisted to get training as an automobile mechanic, and his mother later felt enormous anger at the Air Force. Its report on the accident said that Hepstall and Malinger had failed to “comply with [Technical Order] 21M-LGM25C-2-12 which states ‘if disconnect starts to leak… screw disconnect to fully connected position immediately.’” The report suggested that Malinger — never trained for the task and working in a Titan II silo for the first time — was somehow to blame for what happened.