Two maintenance workers died and three people were injured Friday morning during a steam explosion that occurred in the basement of an outer building at the West Haven Veteran Affairs (VA) hospital campus.
State VA Healthcare Director Alfred Montoya and a host of state and federal politicians, state police, and local emergency responders provided details about that fatal accident during a press conference held in the VA’s main building Friday afternoon.
Montoya said that the two men who died were working on a regularly scheduled replacement of a leaky steam pipe in Building 22, one of the campus’s outer building.
One of the men who died was a VA employee and a Navy veteran, the other was a third-party contractor. Neither was identified by name during the press conference.
The three other people injured were all VA employees. None appear to have suffered life-threatening injuries.
“This campus was built in the 1940s and 50s,” Montoya said, and it is a “constant uphill battle to keep up the infrastructure.”
Maya McFadden Photo
U.S. Sen. Richard Blementhal, at podium, and Gov. Ned Lamont and U.S Sen. Chris Murphy, to his right, at Friday briefing.
He said that the maintenance work started at around 7:30 a.m. and was completed a little after 8 a.m. That’s when “the line was refilled with steam,” Montoya said. And the fatal explosion occurred.
“We have accounted for everyone in that space,” he said. He also said that the VA is currently investigating the explosion to determine its exact cause.
Montoya said that the VA takes care of 58,000 veterans across the state of Connecticut every year. It has campuses in West Haven and in Newington.
“This is a full-service hospital,” he said.
“We are still continuing to take care of veterans at this time,” he added. He said the leak — and the subsequent steam explosion — were isolated to one outer building.
The explosion took place just two days after the country honored veterans on Veteran’s Day, including through a laying of a wreath at the World War I memorial on the New Haven Green.
U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy both offered their pledges to advocate for federal funding to rebuild the aging VA in their respective legislative posts in Washington. Blumenthal is on the Veteran Services Committee and Murphy is on the Appropriations Committee.
“Our hearts go out to the families of the two men who perished today in repairing a system that unfortunately probably should have been replaced long ago,” Blumenthal said. “It’s a clear alarm bell, a wake up call, that we need to do better for our veterans facilities across the country.”
Murphy agreed. “We don’t know what happened,” he said. “There may be a connection between the age of the facility and what happened today. But we don’t know that. But what we do know is that this is an old campus that should have been replaced long ago.”
Click on the Facebook Live video above to watch the full presser.