Federal and state officials are investigating what was behind an explosion at a West Virginia fracking site that left several employees with serious injuries over the weekend. The accident occured early Sunday morning when a spark ignited two storage tanks containing used fracking fluid from a well run by Antero Resources in sparsely-populated Doddridge County, located in northern West Virginia.
“We do not know the ignition source, but we suspect it was a methane explosion,” Antero spokesperson Alvyn Schopp told Reuters. Four of the workers caught in the blast were flown to West Penn Burn Center in Pittsburgh with potentially life-threatening injuries.
The explosion is not the first major accident to hit West Virginia’s natural gas industry this year, according to Grist. In April, an explosion at a site operated by Eureka Hunter Pipeline in Tyler County killed two workers and injured two more.