GRANDVIEW, Mo. – Three people suffered minor injuries after a Grandview plant explosion early Wednesday morning.
The Grandview Fire Department confirmed that around 4:30 a.m. the Corbion plant, which is located near 138th and Botts Road and makes chemicals for food products, exploded blowing out an east wall which was up to seven stories high.
Fifteen people were in the building, working the overnight shift, when the explosion happened.
FOX 4’s Shannon O’Brien spoke with residents who live nearby the plant and heard the blast, which reportedly shook nearby homes.
Leesa Bowman says she was rattled awake at 4:30 in the morning.
“Maybe what I would imagine a bomb was,” she said. “Kind of rumbling, a little bit of rumbling along with it.”
Bowman lives right across the street from the Corbion plant, which produces dry blend food ingredients and emulsifiers.
“I moved here knowing that we had different factories here and not knowing exactly what they were making so, I guess I kind-of took my chance when I moved,” said Bowman.
One of those nearby factories, Pack Leader USA, is owned by Jonathan Lavender, who heard about the explosion on FOX 4. (Watch it in full towards the bottom of this page.)
“It’s the first thing I thought about this morning, wanted to make sure the property was ok,” he said.
Lavender didn’t find any damage to his property, but what he did find from his surveillance camera is what he calls “pretty dramatic.”
“Obviously we were pretty surprised. We can see half the building is torn off. It was a big explosion, you can see some shrapnel,” said Lavender. “You don’t see something like that every day. We’ve had some explosions before, I mean, minor ones but nothing like this morning.”
FOX 4 checked into the factories OSHA record with the U.S. Department of Labor. Corbion used to go by the name Caravan Ingredients.
In January of 2011, caravan was cited for four “serious” OSHA violations; two safety violations and two health violations.
As part of the settlement with the department of labor, the violations were downgraded to “other than serious” and Caravan paid a total penalty of $6,500.
During two more OSHA inspections in 2012 and 2014, no violations were found.
According to a spokesperson for OSHA they have investigators already looking onto this massive explosion.
The Fire Marshall’s preliminary finding is that it was a dust fire that caused the explosion.
Surveillance video from neighboring business, Pack Leader USA:
