Residents witnessed the 'massive fireball' in Appomattox

One of the first things Junior Bryant thought when he heard an explosive roar early Sunday morning was that a plane was crashing into his house.

His brick house was shaking violently and the windows were rattling as if the earth were moving.

Related:

Bryant and his wife Dorothy ran to the door. They couldn’t hear each other scream.

“I opened the door and said ‘God, forgive me’,” he said. “I really didn’t think I would make it out of the house.”

The sky was filled with red dust, dirt and debris when the Bryants opened their front door. “You could see the gas coming out of the ground. When the light lines hit the ground, that’s when it blew,” he said.

A fireball churning several hundred feet into the air blasted through the Appomattox County
neighborhood just as the Bryants took off in their car. “Five seconds, it would have killed us in our yard,” he said. Hours later, Bryant said his head was still ringing.

The jet-engine roar of the exploding gas pipeline jolted many in Appomattox County out of bed around 7:45 a.m. Sunday morning. Some residents living 10 miles from the blast site said they felt their homes shake and heard what sounded like a fighter jet flying near the treetops. The fireball was visible for miles, others said. Many first thought a plane crashed nearby.

Closer to the scene, Robert Wilson went out on his back deck to investigate what was making his house move so violently. At first he didn’t see anything, but then a flame came shooting out of the woods.

“It looked like it was coming very fast toward our house,” he said. That was when he told his family to run.

“I didn’t even want to look,” Glenda Wilson said. “I didn’t want to see my house burn up.”

She was barefoot, wearing only a nightgown with a blanket wrapped around her when she arrived at the emergency shelter set up at Appomattox County High School around 11:30 a.m. Her grandchildren, Brandon and Kourtney, were in pajamas.

“When I woke up, the windows were shaking really bad,” Kourtney said. “I thought something was going to break.”

The Wilsons left so quickly that they only had time to grab one of their dogs, Glenda Wilson said. The other dog was still penned in the backyard, but as long as the woods didn’t burn, Wilson felt he would be OK. “He’s probably scared to death,” she said.

Many of those who evacuated their homes left with only their car keys and the clothes on their back. Some arrived at the shelter barefoot and others needed to borrow pants or shirts from friends.

Henry Riffe, who drove gasoline tankers for decades near Washington, D.C., was getting ready for church when he felt the first blast. His initial thought was that terrorists were attacking, he said.

Riffe, who lived about three miles from the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, said he looked outside on Sunday and “saw all this fire coming at me. It was a big ball of fire scorching the trees.”

He dropped everything, jumped into his van and took off down the street. Once he reached the edge of his neighborhood, Riffe realized his close friend and neighbor Winnie Deiser was up the hill. “I had to go get her,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me go all the way to her house, but when I got to my house, there she was.”

Deiser said she thought at first the vibrations and roar were from an earthquake. “All I could see was this red dust in the air,” she said.

Volunteers from Appomattox County and the Town of Appomattox helped evacuees with food and information. At times, there were more volunteers than evacuees. A local Kroger donated food and volunteers assembled piles of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and served fried chicken. Those evacuees sent to hotels for the night were given meals to take with them.

Later Sunday afternoon, authorities let Bryant back into his home to pick up medications and a few essentials. A brick house next door was all but gone and the siding on Bryant’s house had melted from the inferno. Bryant said he’s concerned the shockwaves damaged his house’s foundation.

“I hope I can move away from that spot,” he said. “I love my house, but that scared me to death.”