Blast survivor: ‘It’s going to haunt me forever’
A loud boom thundered, waking Stewart Bell. The explosion that followed sent him flying from a secondstory bedroom of his Madison Township home.
“I opened my eyes and saw a big fireball coming down,” said Bell, who remembers lying on his driveway, stunned outside his house on Everson Road East just before 4 a.m. Monday.
Bell, 59, went to bed
Sunday night just as he always does but woke to a fiery nightmare from which he still can’t wake.
“I lost everything I own and my girlfriend,” he told The Dispatch by phone Tuesday shortly after being discharged from Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center. “I wish it had been me instead of her.”
Shelly Williams, 54, died from internal injuries after being thrown from a second-story bedroom. The couple had known each other for 27 years.
Investigators returned to the neighborhood in southeastern Franklin County on Tuesday and ruled that “an unspecified natural gas failure within the structure” had caused the explosion, said Lindsey LeBerth, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Commerce’s Division of State Fire Marshal.
Bell, who works as an electrician, wants more answers.
Sometimes he smelled gas outside his home, Bell said. Last week, he bent down and tried smelling near the gas meter. But there was no odor there, he said. However, he smelled gas in the area.
“I did not call” the gas company, he said. “I’m really, really regretting it now.”
He said he never called because he didn’t smell gas inside the house.
“My heart breaks. ... I just hate he didn’t call,” said Kelli Gaza Nowinsky, a Columbia Gas of Ohio spokeswoman. She urged anyone who notices the rotten-egg smell added to natural gas to report it to Columbia and call 911.
A neighbor reported a gas leak in July 2014. It was classified as a nonhazardous leak and eventually was repaired in February 2015, Gaza Nowinsky said. It was the last time a leak was reported in the neighborhood, she said.
Miraculously, Bell suffered no internal injuries or broken bones. He has a burn marking his forehead and one on his shoulders. He also has plenty of scrapes.
“I hurt more today than I did yesterday,” he said. “My injuries aren’t bad.”
Bell, whose home was leveled, said he didn’t know where he was going or which family member he would stay with for the immediate future. He hadn’t been back out to see what remains of his home. And he had been crying off and on for more than a day.
His 6-year-old Husky, Roxie, managed to survive, Bell said. He was waiting to be reunited with her. A second dog that neighbors initially said lived with the couple had passed away this summer.
With so many pieces to pick up, Bell said moving forward will be a struggle.
“It’s going to haunt me forever,” he said, his voice choking with emotion.
He continues to retrace those last moments with Williams.
After the blast, Bell said he sprung to his feet, covered in dirt and soot, and called for Williams. She called back, trapped beneath rubble. He rushed over to her but couldn’t get her out.
“I was not in good shape,” he said. “I could not breathe.”
Neighbors dug Williams out of the debris.
“Someone started screaming ‘Gas!’” and neighbors moved Williams across the street where a neighbor took them in. Williams was put flat on the floor until paramedics arrived. Bell kept asking if she was OK. She told him she was hurt pretty bad but that she was going to be OK, Bell said.
When paramedics arrived, both Bell and Williams were loaded into ambulances.
“I’ll just meet you at the hospital,” Bell promised Williams as she was placed on a gurney and wheeled away by medics.
That was the last time he saw her.
“I didn’t hear anything for a long time,” he said.
He eventually was told she suffered internal bleeding and was in surgery. More time passed. Hours later, he was told she had passed away.
“She cared very much about people,” he said.
Williams was a mother to two sons, had two grandchildren who would sometimes stay with them, and worked at a warehouse for a clothing retailer.
“I always thought it would be her burying me. I just always assumed that,” Bell said. “I never thought it would be like this.”