Morning of terror: Pipeline explosion

Click the links below to listen to the 911 recordings (MP3)

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“God, forgive me my sins!”

Junior Bryant is sure he is about the die. He flings open the front door after a huge boom — like the sound of 10 jet engines flying overhead — comes out of nowhere. A wall of rusty red dirt fills the sky to the left of his Appomattox home.

It’s 7:47 a.m., and Junior and his wife Dorothy had been getting ready to go see her mother at Lynchburg General Hospital.

“A plane done crashed in the yard!” he hollers to Dorothy, who can’t hear him through the roar.

Dorothy, still in her white sleeping shirt, sees the horror on his face. She thinks the Lord has come.

Junior clears his eyes enough to see a plume of white mist shooting out of the ground about 200 yards away.

“Oh my God, it’s the pipeline!” he screams.

Seconds seem like hours as Junior races out the door clad only in shorts and plastic shoes.

Dorothy bolts with him and into the passenger side of their car. By some miracle, it is parked in the driveway facing toward the road, the keys already in the ignition. Dorothy cranks the engine as Junior dives into the driver’s side.

They peel out of the driveway, bear right and speed 500 yards up the hill on Oakville Road. They stop just past the driveway to the Appomattox County Industrial Park and get out to look back.

Just then, a patrol car driven by Appomattox deputy John Mattox screeches to a halt in the middle of the road.

“What’s happening?”

Bryant replies: “The pipeline has blown!”

They can barely hear each other over the roar.

Power lines bounce up and down from the tremors coming from almost 800 pounds per square inch of natural gas jetting from the ground.

Then, almost as if in slow motion, a power line falls and a fireball blasts into the sky as far as Bryant and Mattox can see.

The force of the explosion rocks Mattox and the Bryants back on their heels. The heat from the fireball,  300 yards tall and expanding,  sears their skin.

“Run!” Mattox screams.

Mattox can feel the oxygen being sucked into the blaze. He’s convinced the fireball will keep stretching and take out the town of Appomattox, about a mile away.

He pulls out a small digital camera, takes one photograph of the inferno and tucks it under the driver’s seat. He hopes the evidence will help investigators. He’s sure he won’t be alive to tell the story.

Mattox started the morning with his usual patrol rounds along Oakville Road, also known as Virginia 26. He sees the gas line explosion — a vast plume of dirt and boulders flinging into the air — from about a quarter-mile away and immediately radios in. Then the fireball came.

He runs from house to house along Oakville Road, pounding on doors, screaming over the roar, anything to get people out of their homes and running for their lives.

Mattox is convinced the fireball will result in many deaths. He’s frustrated that some residents aren’t moving fast enough.

He tells one woman who is about to go back inside for her cell phone that there isn’t time.

“Get out, get out!” Mattox screams.

“228 to Appomattox. Just had a major explosion right in front of me about a mile out of town. It’s still exploding as we speak,” Mattox says calmly on his radio. “Start somebody right now. It’s a major scene, ma’am.”

Moments after Mattox radios in the first explosion, every single call line at the Appomattox County Emergency Dispatch Center lights as seemingly everyone in the county reports the blast.

Dispatcher Lelia Johnson takes the crush of calls and co-worker Kim Bryant rapidly dispatches emergency crews.

Mattox, whose badge number is 228, radios in again.

Now there’s a second explosion, this time with fire that’s at least 300 yards wide and rapidly expanding.

“Notify anybody you can. The gas line just exploded again!” Mattox yells into the radio. “It’s a major fireball, ma’am! I need anybody you can!”

Bryant and Johnson pause and look at each other.

“Did he really say what he said?” Bryant says. Johnson nods.

The deputy’s voice, barely audible over the roar of spewing gas, chills the dispatchers to the core.

“There was something in his voice — I went on alert,” Bryant later said. “You work with them so much and you know their voice. You know when something is wrong.”

“Appomattox to 228! Are you 10-4?” Johnson says.

“Get everybody else, get ’em out!” he shouts.

“10-4, 228,” Johnson says. “We’re doing everything we can to get extra people out there to you. We have fire department members responding”

“We gotta shut down! There are a lot of victims out there. Advise! And I need somebody to come and give me some help going through the scene north of McKenna Farm for at least a mile,” Mattox says, his voice crackling through the roar. “If they don’t get the gas shut off, this thing’s going to expand. They’ve got to cut the gas off now!”

“10-4,” Johnson says, her voice wavering slightly. “I’m trying to find the number to contact the pipeline at this time.”

Appomattox County Sheriff Wilson Staples drives straight to the scene from his Evergreen home, about five miles away.

As he drives, he hears his off-duty deputies radioing in. When he arrives by the industrial park, he gets out of his car and checks in. He worries people he knows have died.

“It felt like an eternity watching those homes that were eventually destroyed, watching them ignite and continue to burn, burn,” Staples said later.

“It was a very helpless feeling.”

At the top of the hill, Junior and Dorothy Bryant watch the inferno.

Dorothy is frantic to let her family know she and Junior survived, but she has no way to contact them. Cell phones are still in the house, along with everything else.

“Somebody call my kids,” she screams through the roar. “Somebody please call my kids!”

Junior is silent. He stares at the fireball and realizes he’s alive. “God, how I’ve been living for you, I’m gonna live it better because you pulled me through this and I thank you,” he says.

As shock begins to set in, he thinks everything they have, house and all, likely has been incinerated. He has his wife, though, and he can’t bear to let her out of his sight. That’s when the tears start flowing. “Everything I own is gone,” he weeps.

They stay there, watching, unsure of what to do. Relatives who live nearby show up and one of them gives Dorothy a pair of red pants and bedroom slippers. Someone, Junior can’t remember who, loans him a shirt.

Mattox figures those living in the five houses closest to the blast didn’t survive. No one can get to them to check because the pipeline-fueled furnace could incinerate them. The stress of the moment hits him in the gut. He vomits on the side of the road.

“I thought it would take my life,” Mattox says later. “I thought the world was going to end — at least for me.”

Dispatchers Johnson and Bryant both have husbands who are volunteer firefighters — and now have been called to a scene their wives don’t yet fully understand.

Johnson’s daughter and baby grandson are at her house on Oakville Road, less than a mile from the explosion. She doesn’t have time to alert them, but her husband calls, telling their daughter to take the baby and run.

Calls flood the center, many from panicked town residents:

“Plane crash!”

“Fire!”

“Explosion!”

One woman asks if there was a nuclear attack.

Johnson calmly tells callers, over and over again, there’s a problem with the pipeline. She asks if they have another emergency and if not, she hangs up to grab the next call.

While authorities from throughout the region begin moving toward the scene, Johnson makes several calls to numbers associated with Williams Gas Pipeline, the company that operates the line.

Within minutes, she reaches a live voice. “This is Appomattox 911 communications center. We have a gas explosion on 26,” Johnson says to an operator at the gas control center in Houston.

“Yes ma’am. We have somebody en route to that site right now,” the operator says.

After about 45 minutes, firefighters finally tell Junior and Dorothy Bryant they need to leave. Fire trucks and emergency vehicles from throughout the region are arriving and the Bryants’ car is in the way.

Junior Bryant drives off, gripping the steering wheel hard, staring forward.

Lines of people have formed along the road, many evacuated from their homes, others worried about family members who live close to the site.

Junior’s father sees a familiar blue car coming over the hill and relief washes over him. Bryant is in such a daze that he only sees the people.

As he passes the barricade set up at Log Cabin Road, he hears a honk.

He snaps his head around and sees a familiar face. “There’s Daddy!” he says.

Junior’s father had been certain they were gone. He had prayed from the moment he’d heard of the explosion. They exchange looks and see tears in each other’s eyes.

“I didn’t think you could live through that kind of noise and what we was seeing. I thought I was gonna die,” Junior said later. “I never felt death so close.”

Epilogue

The explosion and fireball destroyed two homes, damaged several others and injured five people, none seriously. Dozens of nearby residents were evacuated last Sunday. After a day at a temporary shelter and a night in local motels, most were allowed back to their homes the next day. An exact cause still is under investigation by state, federal and gas company officials and may not be known for months.

The Bryants’ house survived, though rocks crashed through the roof, and vinyl siding on one part of the house melted, among other damage. The couple has stayed with relatives since the blast and does not want to return.