By CHRIS TUCKER
and PETER O’CAIN
Bremerton Patriot

BREMERTON — An acrid smell of smoke filled the air near Motel 6 in Bremerton as firefighters and other emergency personnel dealt with an explosion that partially destroyed the building around 8:30 p.m. Aug. 18.

The acting hotel manager, Tonya Hinds, evacuated the building after being informed of a gas leak shortly before 8 p.m. Hinds, a former volunteer firefighter, said she stepped outside the motel and could hear the leak about 50 yards away.

“The smell was so intense I knew this was very big,” Hinds said. “I called 911 immediately.”

“I wanted to make sure all my guests were out,” she said.

About 10 minutes after the rooms were emptied, the east end of the motel exploded, Hinds said.

Bremerton Police Chief Steve Strachan said there were no reports of anyone trapped inside.

One employee from Cascade Natural Gas was critically injured with second- and third-degree burns and flown to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with our employee and his family. He sustained serious injuries and is receiving care at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center,” said Eric Martuscelli, vice president of operations for Cascade Natural Gas. “We greatly appreciate the quick action by the motel employees to evacuate guests after learning of the natural gas odor.”

Hinds said the motel had 75-80 guests in 42 occupied rooms, and the blast destroyed about one-quarter of the building.

Hinds said one guest may have seen someone jumping out of a window of the three story motel just before the leak.

Firefighters from Bremerton, South Kitsap, Central Kitsap and Navy Fire responded to the scene.

After the explosion, hundreds of people lined the streets near the motel to watch firefighters deal with the night time destruction. Among them was Johnathan Davis, who lives near the motel on Charleston Avenue. Davis said he was cooking hamburger around 8 p.m. when the explosion happened

“Boom! I thought, ‘Damn. Earthquake!” Davis said. “I was jumping.”

He ran outside and toward the motel and saw a big fire, he said.

“The car wash is gone,” he said.

“I walk past it every day,” he said of the motel.

Domico Hutson, who was visiting at a residence along Charleston Avenue, said the whole house shook.

“I thought it was a bomb or something,” Hutson said.

“The part of that ‘L’ is gone,” Hutson said of the “L”-shaped motel.

“The part you see right now is all that stands at that building,” he said of the longer line of the “L.” The short part was destroyed.

Randy Reite, who lives on Ford Avenue just a couple of blocks from the motel, said the explosion “Sure shook the house” at around 8:15 p.m.

Reite was listening to the police scanner at the time of the explosion. He said the scanner traffic indicated the gas company had been working on a problem with a gas smell at the hotel for about an hour. Then he heard that firetrucks had been dispatched to the motel. Then came the explosion.

“It was a pretty good explosion,” he said.

Reite said homes right across the street from the motel had their windows blasted out.

Two guests missing, but probably OK

Police are actively looking for two missing motel guests, said Bremerton Police Department Capt. Tom Wolfe.

“We did a phone ping on one of the two missing and it came up … far from here. So that’s a good sign for us.”

Another good sign is that vehicles associated with the missing people were not parked at the motel, and search and rescue hasn’t found any victims yet.

“I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but it’s looking good that we got everybody out,” Wolfe said.

Wolfe said detectives were going through security video footage of the incident.

“Someone’s helping them go through that right now. They should have a pretty definitive idea of what happened to that (gas) meter and how it got broken,” Wolfe said.

Wolfe addressed Internet rumors that had been going around.

“Last night there was three different kind of rumors flying around on what happened. One was a girl jumped out the window and broke the meter. One was that a woman in a white Ford Explorer was outside beating on the pipe, and another was that they hit it with a car.

“As we ran it all down we did substantiate that a girl did jump out of a window last night,” at the motel during a domestic violence situation that police were already responding to. Police found the woman and interviewed her.

“So the scaling-the-pipe thing might have some credence to it, or it’s just a variation of bits and pieces people are hearing.”

Wolfe said his understanding is that the gas meter was just like the kind you’d find outside a normal home.

“That was on fire for hours last night,” he said of the meter.

When asked if there was anything else that people should be aware of, Wolfe philosophized a bit and said, “I think (people) should all be kind to each other. I think everyone should slow down when they drive and use your blinkers and check your smoke alarms.”

Motel clerk describes what happened

Motel 6 clerk Tonya Hinds was working at the front office Aug. 18 when someone told her there was a gas leak. She went to inspect the line, located on the southeast corner of the motel, and didn’t see the ruptured line, but she could hear the sound of the escaping gas and smelled a strong odor.

“We had 42 rooms occupied,” Hinds said of the motel’s occupancy. “There were probably 75-80 guests altogether in those rooms.” She knew that some of the motel guests were smokers.

She called the fire department, but by the time they arrived, Hinds had a bad feeling about the situation.

“I just saw it becoming a bad situation if we didn’t get control of everybody and get everybody out. It was just a gut instinct I think. It just kept telling me, ‘Just pull that alarm. Don’t even take time to knock on doors.’ I don’t remember if I was talking with 911 or who I was talking to … I said, ‘I’m going to evacuate my building right now. I don’t feel good about this.’”

She pulled the alarm.

“I ran out in the parking lot. The strobes went off – it’s very loud (the alarm). And I just told everybody ‘I want everybody out.’ People wanted to go back, I said, ‘No, I just want everybody out into the upper parking lot away from the building right now.’”

“[We are] just blessed by God that it just all went the way that it did. Everybody followed instructions and did what they were supposed to do.”

Hinds teared up a little as she spoke about the motel guests. She said she was happy everyone was OK.

“My guests were tremendous … I’m just happy to see their smiling faces and their children.”

“It’s a sad but good day.”

Hinds said that earlier in her life she was a volunteer firefighter and first responder. Then, she put out a van fire and saved some people involved in a wreck.

“This is my home. This is my community,” Hinds said.

Hinds said she had heard of Internet rumors that someone may have ruptured the gas line when they climbed the side of the building, but she couldn’t confirm that rumor.

Displaced guests

Warren Henry, 59, was spending his first night in the motel. He’d just moved to Bremerton from Yuma to begin a new construction job at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor. He packed a small amount of belongings onto his motorcycle and made the trip in two days.

His first day was supposed to be Aug. 19.

Henry said he was watching TV in his motel room when he began drifting in and out of consciousness. He thinks it was from the gas.

“As soon as I woke up I had a massive headache,” Henry said. “As soon as I woke up they’re yelling ‘Gas! Gas!’”

Still in a gas induced daze, Henry left his room without any of his belongings. Not his phone, not his laptop, not even his shoes. Now, everything he brought to Bremerton — save for the clothes on his back — is gone.

Standing barefoot on the street, Henry watched the east end of the motel explode and envelope the Cascade Natural Gas employee.

“I’m watching it and there was a dude standing on the retaining wall,” Henry said. “It exploded and he disappeared.

“I can’t believe I just watched a guy blow up like that.”

Jeff Jackson was visiting the U.S. from Brisbane, Australia. He came to the states for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota during the first week of August. He was taking a road trip around the western part of the country on his way back to Los Angeles before flying to Australia.

Everything he’d collected along the way was in his room, including gifts for his grandkids. The only thing he took from his room was his iPad. Despite the losses, he was in high spirits.

“We’re OK,” Jackson said. “That’s just material [expletive]. Who cares?”

According to the Red Cross, the motel made accommodations for the displaced guests.

“[We’re] assessing the status of those who’ve been affected,” said Dave Rasmussen, disaster program manager for the Kitsap Red Cross. “We’re just in the beginning stages of helping people walk through this very difficult situation.”

Rasmussen said community members brought food and water donations to the scene.

“As difficult as this time is, we’re really seeing in a number of ways how this community is coming together,” Rasmussen said. “We’re deeply appreciative of that.”

Red Cross is accepting monetary donations at www.redcross.org.

Search and rescue dogs on the scene

Bob Calkins was working with his search and rescue dog “Magnum” at the scene Aug. 19. He said the dogs hadn’t found any signs of potential victims, but noted that they could only search a limited portion of the building due to the extent of the damage.

Calkins said that despite the strong smell of smoke, the dogs could still sniff out trapped people.

“It’s amazing. When you go into a pizza parlor, you smell pizza. When a dog goes into a pizza parlor they smell, pepperoni, marinara, the dough. They can separate odors in the same way you and i would look at something and separate colors. So they can actually very easily smell through that,” Calkins said.

Kitsap Way in Bremerton. Folks on scene (non EMT/police) say this was caused by a gas leak. pic.twitter.com/Vgm2bcUwTu

— Peter O’Cain (@PeterOCain) August 19, 2015