This is a developing story and will be updated.

Recovery crews on Friday afternoon retrieved the body of another worker who died in Tuesday’s Longview paper mill chemical rupture. That brings the confirmed death toll at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Co. to nine, with two more people still missing and presumed dead.

The effort to recover those final victims of the worst industrial accident Washington state has seen in a century could be slow and challenging, Matt Amos, Longview Fire battalion chief, said Friday.

Crews have been able to bring vacuum trucks and hundreds of feet of hose to the scene to remove liquid and were able to move hundreds of feet deeper into the site, where a 900,000-gallon vat of a caustic chemical known as “white liquor” was stored for use in paper making, Amos said. And air quality readings at the site have improved.

But searchers are maintaining a distance around the massive ruptured tank, which may still contain tens of thousands of gallons of the corrosive liquid.

“It’s a lot of precision work,” Amos said. “It does continue to be incredibly difficult to everyone working the scene.”

As they search for the remains of the two still-missing people, crews are also trying to preserve evidence for investigations that will begin once the recovery effort concludes, Amos said. With limited access to some damaged areas of the mill, officials were not able to estimate how much longer the search will continue.

As recovery efforts continue, state and federal environmental agencies have been working with Longview officials to respond to the environmental consequences of a chemical release that killed fish in dikes near Nippon Dynawave and briefly led to elevated pH levels in the Columbia River earlier in the week.

They’re also preparing for the next stage in an investigation into what went wrong, which will only start once the remains of anyone killed or injured have been removed.

When investigators are able to access the full scene, they’ll be entering an industrial site criss-crossed by powerlines and heavy equipment and mangled by the damage caused on Tuesday.

Several walls were blown out by the chemical release and equipment was heavily damaged, Brian Wood, support services director at Nippon, said Friday. The closest views of damage near the tank have come from drone images, and it is not clear how long it will be before officials gain more direct access.

“We are very much in early days,” Wood said.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/29/longview-9th-person-confirmed-dead-paper-mill/