Appomattox heals, one year after pipeline blast

Special Report: Appomattox Pipeline Explosion

• More stories on the pipeline explosion
• Aerial photos of the site one year ago and now
• 911 recordings from the day of the explosion
• Maps of pipeline incidents across the U.S.

APPOMATTOX —  Deputy John Mattox still patrols the stretch of Virginia 26 that’s just north of town.

He passes the spot daily — right there, at the crest of the hill — where a year ago he stopped, stepped out of his cruiser and snapped a photo.

He knew what he had to do early that Sunday morning, and he thought it would kill him. The photo, he reasoned, would help investigators piece together how he died.

As he felt the air sucking away from him and into an expanding fireball just down the hill, Mattox tucked the camera under the driver’s seat. Then he ran toward the inferno fueled by a ruptured natural gas line, going door to door to move residents from their homes to safety.

A year later, new grass and weeds cover the scorched earth. The wreckage of two homes blown apart in the explosion is gone. Except for melted siding on a few homes up the road and some boarded-up windows, there is little physical evidence of the blast that rocked this tight-knit community on Sept. 14, 2008.

Even Mattox’s photo is gone. He deleted it from his camera a few months later.Details of that day, though, are seared in his memory. It is the same for many Appomattox residents who lived through the crisis — similar to the way that history-changing events are etched in the minds of those who experienced them, like President John F. Kennedy’s assassination or the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Greg Heath still remembers his panicked realization that morning that the pipeline he helped maintain had ruptured.

The Williams Gas Company employee was awake in his bed when the phone rang. As he answered the call, he wife went to the window. She yelled for him to come look.

“I looked at the fireball and I knew we started it,” he said. “The only thing that can burn like that is a ruptured pipeline. I thought, ‘Good God, we’ve set the world on fire.”

Heath has worked for Williams for 24 years and is trained in what to do in an emergency. He hopped into his truck and drove to the compressor station, a tenth of a mile from his home. The control panel there showed dangerously low pressure in one of the lines. He pushed a button to shut down the pumps that moved gas through the lines.

As he tried to report the rupture to the company’s control office, other local Williams employees called from valve locations along the pipeline demanding to know which line to shut down completely. They didn’t need to be called. They had seen, and heard, the rupture.
Heath didn’t go out to the site of the blast until four days later.

“I was devastated,” he said. “Everything was just blackened and awful. It was like a piece of hell.”Heath still doesn’t like to ride past the site, about three miles from his home, even though most evidence of the damage has been erased.

“It was hard for me to see what we had done,” he said. “Those people lost everything they own. … I felt like we did a good job of taking care of what needed to be done.”

Mattox, the deputy, was called a hero for his actions getting residents to safety. He knows it is a miracle, really, that no one died in the blast.

“This caught me off guard by its magnitude,” he said recently. “I will always remember the size of that fireball. That fireball was massive. … I believed that it would spread to adjacent residences.”

Just before Mattox took the photograph, he met Junior and Dorothy Bryant on the road as they fled from the cloud of dust and the rocks that punctured their roof and landed in their living room.

A year later, Bryant’s home — located a few hundred yards from the blast site — sits empty with a for sale sign in the front yard. Sometimes, he drives to his home of six years and sits in the driveway just to think. The Bryants never really returned to that house except to gather their belongings.

The couple lived with family members for a few months before settling with Williams. The company bought their old house and their new one, just down the street from the company’s compressor station. Some people joke about their new address, but Dorothy loves the house, Junior Bryant said.

“People look at us like, ‘Didn’t you get enough?’” he said. “I don’t find no fear in it. This thing was not supposed to happen.”

He’s hiked and hunted along those pipelines for most of his life. The Bryants looked at other places after the blast, but fell in love with the spacious house on Pumping Station Road.

It took a while, though, for Junior and Dorothy to be comfortable in their new home. Sounds of maintenance on the compressor station startled them. And once in a restaurant when a balloon popped, Junior almost hit the bottom of the table.

He thanks God that he and his wife are still alive.

“If it had been at night, I’m not sure we would have gotten out,” Bryant said. “If we hadn’t gotten out before the fireball, we wouldn’t have made it.”

He remembers sitting in the emergency shelter eating dinner with Dorothy that night a year ago.

“I would have thought it would never happen to me, where we live,” Bryant said. “We were sitting there eating dinner and thinking, ‘Wow, this is real.’ One morning things are normal and the next, the world’s upside down.”

He thinks maybe there was a purpose for it in his life. His carpenter’s business was starting to take a hit due to the economy; now, with Williams buying their home, they don’t have a house payment.

“We could have kept the place if we wanted to, but I let (the company) buy it,” he said, adding that he was afraid with its history he would be unable to sell the house later on.

“Everyone we talked to told us they’ve known (the pipeline company) for years and said they’d make it right,” he said. “Whatever we asked for, whatever we needed, they made sure we had.”

While the rupture caught many residents by surprise, handling such a massive incident was something that the county’s emergency workers had trained for — a federal requirement since the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

“That day and the days that followed showed that we may be a small community but we are capable of taking care of that event in a very effective manner,” said Sheriff Wilson Staples.

“Sometimes bad things happen and when they take place, that is when you get to see the best in people.

“It makes me proud to be a part of this county and this community. People here have the mindset to give unselfishly of themselves to people in need.”

The rupture brought the pipeline to the attention of many in Appomattox who had previously ignored it.

“People in the county didn’t know the pipeline was near their houses,” said Timmy Garrett, Appomattox’s fire chief. “We had people who bought their houses, and had no idea that they were 25 feet from a gas line.”

Now, strange or loud noises around the pipeline and compressor station prompt calls to emergency dispatch, said Bobby Wingfield, the county’s emergency services director.

“With the presence of the gas pipeline, any abnormality, any suspicious activity draws attention,” he said. “People, not just pipeline people, are more aware of it.

“It will take a while for people, when they hear a loud sound, to think it’s something other than the pipeline.”